Creating Video Games in a Middle School Language Arts Classroom: A Narrative Account

This article describes the author’s experience co-facilitating a project for which seventh-grade students designed and created original video games based on Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. The author provides an overview of recent literature on video game implementation in the classroom and explains how the project was designed and facilitated, how student engagement changed over time, and how learning outcomes (both expected and unexpected) were assessed. He also reveals how students were encouraged to reflect on the learning process through writing a narrative essay and completing a survey, and concludes with a call for more quantitative research on the topic of using game play for learning purposes.