Sample of Student Work from time in China

 Ancient Cultures Project - Companion to our world literature, culture, religion, and  mythology units.

Featured here is the game from the Ancient Greece group.  

The game board is Mount Olympus and players progress up the sides of the mountain using magnetic pieces and a wire

path.  Each player is an Olympic athlete competing in the name
of one of the gods and can call upon their deities favor during
the race.  Each deity's favor manifests in a way related to the 
deity, for example: Hera is spiteful, she can cause racers ahead
of her champion to stumble and loose a turn.

The game is won when a racer claims the "Flame of Intelligence"
from the peak of Mount Olympus, recreating the "Crime"

of Prometheus and the origin of humanity.

Featured above, students from another group are play-testing the
game.  At the conclusion of the play test they will provide
feedback to the group who designed the game on the rules and
complete a short quiz so that the designers can check if their
educational goals were met by the experience.

Assignment:  Design a game that can played in a classroom without any presentation or input from the game's creators, and provide the players a chance to learn what it was like to be a member of a given culture.

This project represented the Final Assessment for grade 11, Semester 1 for students in my English class at The High School Affiliated With Xi'an Jiao Tong University.

Students began the project by examining important questions of their own culture and the role culture plays in their own identity.  The project also built off of the final assessment in the prior year which was a Personal Narrative.

Throughout the semester students engaged in connected projects and learning activities including retelling of myths, giving informative presentations on the culture and more.

After the play tests, featured in these pictures, students wrote a self evaluation and reflection paper.