Sarah Gagnon, creative director at UW–Madison’s Field Day Lab, recently joined Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Central Time” to discuss the lab’s latest game, Headlines and High Water, and how Field Day works to create beautiful and engaging educational video games.
Field Day, which is based at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) within the School of Education, released Headlines and High Water earlier this month. The free, web-based game aims to teach middle school students crucial media literacy skills by allowing them to step into the shoes of a young journalist.
In her “Central Time” interview, Gagnon said she hopes the game will introduce students to the concept of news literacy earlier in their education.
“Kids have access to news earlier and earlier, but there are not a lot of journalism or media literacy classes until high school, so we were excited about making this for middle school kids,” she said.
Though the game was created for middle school classrooms, Gagnon said Headlines and High Water has been a hit with older students and adults as well. Field Day works with teachers and students throughout the development process for each of their games.
Gagnon also spoke about the value of using video games as classroom tools. She acknowledged there is some pushback on gaming at school, but said Field Day works to acknowledge and channel that existing interest into opportunities for learning.
“We want to be where kids are, we want to go where they’re going,” she said. “We want to be there making them beautiful, artful, really well-informed material.”
Listen to Gagnon’s full interview on Wisconsin Public Radio here.