Category: games

  • Interactive Fiction Database and CYOA Video Stories

    Interactive Fiction Database and CYOA Video Stories

    I grew up in the 1980s and loved reading “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) stories. From time to time, as an advocate of “Playing with Media” and “Show What You Know with Media” pedagogy and learning, I’ve created my own CYOA stories and helped others create them too. Today I learned about the “Interactive Fiction…

  • Packet Defender 2.0

    Packet Defender 2.0

    Back in January of 2025 I used ChatGPT to “vibe code” a project I named “Packet Defender.” This project was and is my attempt to use HTML and JavaScript to create a simple, text-based and web-based game to help my middle school web design students learn some of the basic terms and concepts about how…

  • Kahoot Quiz from YouTube Video via OpenMCQ

    Kahoot Quiz from YouTube Video via OpenMCQ

    For the past couple years as a middle school STEM and media literacy teacher, I’ve LOVED using AI / artificial intelligence tools to create instructional materials for my students and streamline my workflows as an instructional creator. Yesterday I created a 9 minute tutorial video demonstrating how I use a YouTube video with good instructional…

  • Packet Defender 1.0

    Packet Defender 1.0

    Today was the first day of our spring semester, and I’m teaching middle school web design again. As part of our introductory class, we watched the video, “The Internet: IP Addresses & DNS” from Code.org and then played a Kahoot I made with AI about it, using the video transcript. As we learn to create…

  • Scratch Coding Resources

    Scratch Coding Resources

    I received an email earlier this year from a teacher in South Africa who is interested in starting a school and including coding in the curriculum. I finally responded to that message (yikes!) asking for links to CODING RESOURCES I use and have shared, including resources for using Scratch coding from MIT. These are the…

  • Daily Dedication, Check-In Question, and Selfie-Bingo

    One of the things I love about teaching at an independent school is the opportunity to have “advisory time.” At my North Carolina school, I’m a seventh grade advisor again this year, and we have an hour after lunch for advisory every third school day. Today was our third advisory meeting of the year, and…

  • Minecraft, YouTube and Communication Skills

    Yesterday morning I spent some time finalizing my podcast migration to Anchor. My “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” podcast channel, which I launched in 2005, now has 481 episodes. The RSS feed I used previously, (before Anchor: Created with the Podlove Podcast Publisher) just included the most recent 50 episodes. Those 50 episodes uploaded…

  • Takeaways and Learning from the MSON Summer 2020 Annual Conference

    Last week I had the opportunity to attend the second edition of the MSON Summer 2020 Annual Conference, held virtually via Zoom. MSON is the “Malone Schools Online Network” (@MaloneSchools), and for the first time this year (I’m guessing because of COVID-19) their annual conference was open to educators everywhere. Our school (where my wife…

  • Quickly Convert Minecraft EE Portfolio PDFs into JPG Images

    The past two weeks I have led and taught “virtual Minecraft summer camps” for elementary and middle school students, with the help of a fantastic team of high school volunteers who have earned service hours as virtual camp counselors / moderators. I’m in the process of writing down many of my lessons learned from this…

  • Virtual Minecraft Camps for Elementary and Middle School Students: June 2020

    Update June 2, 2020: mdtech.casady.org/minecraft has updated information about both these upcoming virtual Minecraft camps for students. Five years ago, our youngest daughter (then age 11) participated in a virtual, summer Minecraft camp through “Connected Camps,” an outstanding organization based in California. She had a great experience, and we recorded a 20 minute podcast reflection…