Games on the brains
Sebastian Houston, a ninth grader at Lakes City High School, works on solving a puzzle to "escape" the Discovery Bus in the high school parking lot on Thursday. HANNAH NEFF/Press
Matthew Asher, left, and SingSing Zhu, ninth graders at Lake City High School, prepare to solve riddles in the educational Discovery Bus in the school parking lot as part of their game design class on Thursday. HANNAH NEFF/Press
Students of Lake City High School in teacher Scott Jacobson's game design class worked on puzzles like this one in the Discovery Bus in the school parking lot on Thursday. HANNAH NEFF/Press
Evan Lafferty, left, a tenth grader, and Mason McCarthy, a senior, of Lake City High School work on puzzles to "escape" the Discovery Bus on Thursday in the school parking lot as part of the game design class. HANNAH NEFF/Press
Students of Scott Jacobson's game design class at Lake City High School explore the Discovery Bus, a 60-foot educational bus owned by the Community Library Network, to find clues and solve puzzles. As part of the class, students participated in an "escape the bus" activity on Thursday in the school parking lot. HANNAH NEFF/Press
To kick off learning at the start of the school year, Lake City High School game design students were challenged to “escape the bus” Thursday in the school's parking lot.
The Discovery Bus, a 60-footer owned by the Community Library Network, travels to different locations across Kootenai County equipped with tools for learning science, technology, engineering, art and math.
“It’s cool,” said Matthew Asher, a ninth grader. “I think (the puzzles) are interesting.”
For Thursday’s challenge, students worked together to solve puzzles, riddles, challenges and find clues to “escape” the bus.
Nick Madsen, emerging technology librarian for the Community Library Network and manager of the bus, said the game focuses on building teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving.
“We find it’s really good to do that at the beginning of the year because it also just helps that group cohesion start to form,” Madsen said. “The students have been doing really well with those challenges.”
Madsen said each escape challenge can highlight a different aspect of learning. This particular one challenged students’ computational thinking, which is important for coding, programming, working with computers and basic problem solving.
Scott Jacobson, a science and technology teacher at Lake City, invited the bus as part of a back-to-school welcome for his game design class.
“I just wanted to make it exciting for students when they came back,” Jacobson said. “I wanted to come up with a mystery game.”
Jacobson created an alternate reality game called “Agents of Asterisks,” which involves students solving mysteries and going out into the community to collect fliers. The game also gives a preview of what students can expect to learn throughout the year.
“I like to cater to all the interests, the writers, the coders and the digital artists,” Jacobson said. “All the things that are key into the whole gaming world, I allow them that freedom in the class to kind of pick what works for them.”
Students in the game design class can use their skills in coding, graphic art, plot creating, animations and more to create games.
Jacobson said he also tries to incorporate games outside of game design class because he believes they're great for learning and can teach many things, including strong memorization skills, reading and math.
He said some students find it hard to be focused on something they don’t have an interest in, and incorporating games into those topics can help make learning more interesting.
“When you have to memorize stuff you don't care about, it's really hard to do,” Jacobson said. “But if you're doing something that you enjoy, it's like your brain just remembers that type of thing.”
