Step up your teaching game by attending GDC 2017's Education Summit

With less than two weeks to go until the 2017 Game Developers Conference kicks off, organizers are eager to let you know about some of the smart education-focused talks that will be taking place during the show.

Each of these talks is part of the GDC Education Summit, one of eight that will take place Monday, February 27th and Tuesday, February 28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA during the first two days of the conference.

Each Summit offers a comprehensive overview of a specific game industry discipline, and this year the GDC Education Summit has a strong lineup that features talks from experts around the industry! 

For example, Sean Bouchard is a researcher at the USC Game Innovation Lab, and in his GDC 2017 Education Summit session on "How Twitch Made Me A Better Teacher" he will speak to how the video game streaming platform Twitch offers educators of game design and analysis an opportunity to improve their teaching practice.

Bouchard teaches game design at the University of Southern California and broadcasts a weekly live show in which he plays games and discusses the design decisions behind them. In this session he will share the ways streaming has improved his interactions with students, and how other educators can similarly benefit from performative games criticism.

And in his Education Summit session on "Utilizing Box Copy to Enhance Game Writing Pedagogy", George Mason University assistant professor Seth Hudson will explore how to utilize actual box copy/art as text to enhance the teaching of narrative design, game writing, game history, and game criticism.

The retail 'face' of the game, the rhetoric used to entice players says a great deal about a game's intended player audience, the evolution of the medium and individual genres, and even the social issues and controversies surrounding games. Hudson will share some successful strategies for using box copy in instruction that attendees can bend to most any purpose!

Plus, in her talk on "Confronting Games and Ethics: Challenging Students to Be Critical Designers" Marist College assistant professor Karen Schreier will share tips, exercises, and assessments that can be used to spur the critical consideration of games. Example topics include: #gamergate; systemic bias and representations of gender, race, class, sexual identity, and disability in games; empathy and emotion; harassment and bullying, and transgressive play.

Such topics often invite controversy and even discomfort for games students (and faculty), but they're important to talk about, and in this session techniques will be shared on how to best support an inclusive classroom for critical conversations and reflective design work.

For more details on these and other sessions taking place at GDC 2017, head over to the conference Session Scheduler.

For more information on GDC 2017, which is taking place February 27th through March 3rd in San Francisco, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.

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