Lee Sheldon

Discover how to engage your students and raise their grades and attendance in your classroom. THE MULTIPLAYER CLASSROOM: DESIGNING COURSEWORK AS A GAME is your detailed guide to designing any structured learning experience as a game. Written for professional educators or those learning to be educators, here are the tools to engage and excite students by using principles learned in the development of popular video games. Suitable for use in the classroom or the boardroom, the book features a reader-friendly style that introduces game concepts and vocabulary in a logical way. You don't need any experience making games or even playing games to use this book. Yet, you will learn how to create multiplayer games for any age on any subject. Bring your classroom into the 21st century!

Designing Coursework as a Game

The Multiplayer Classroom

This is the third edition of Character Development and Storytelling for Games, a standard work in the field that brings all of the teaching from the first two books up to date and tackles the new challenges of today. Professional game writer and designer Lee Sheldon combines his experience and expertise in this updated edition. New examples, new game types, and new challenges throughout the text highlight the fundamentals of character writing and storytelling. But this book is not just a box of techniques for writers of video games. It is an exploration of the roots of character development and storytelling that readers can trace from Homer to Chaucer to Cervantes to Dickens and even Mozart. Many contemporary writers also contribute insights from books, plays, television, films, and, yes, games. Sheldon and his contributors emphasize the importance of creative instinct and listening to the inner voice that guides successful game writers and designers. Join him on his quest to instruct, inform, and maybe even inspire your next great game.

Character Development and Storytelling for Games

The Multiplayer Classroom: Game Plans is a companion to The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game, now in its second edition from CRC Press. This book covers four multiplayer classroom projects played in the real world in real time to teach and entertain. They were funded by grants or institutions, collaborations between Lee Sheldon, as writer/designer, and subject matter experts in various fields. They are written to be accessible to anyone--designer, educator, or layperson--interested in game-based learning. The subjects are increasingly relevant in this day and age: physical fitness, Mandarin, cybersecurity, and especially an online class exploring culture and identity on the internet that is unlike any online class you have ever seen. Read the annotated, often-suspenseful stories of how each game, with its unique challenges, thrills, and spills, was built. Lee Sheldon began his writing career in television as a writer-producer, eventually writing more than 200 shows ranging from Charlie’s Angels (writer) to Edge of Night (head writer) to Star Trek: The Next Generation (writer-producer). Having written and designed more than forty commercial and applied video games, Lee spearheaded the first full writing for games concentration in North America at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the second writing concentration at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is a regular lecturer and consultant on game design and writing in the United States and abroad. His most recent commercial game, the award-winning The Lion’s Song, is currently on Steam. For the past two years he consulted on an "escape room in a box," funded by NASA, that gives visitors to hundreds of science museums and planetariums the opportunity to play colonizers on the moon. He is currently writing his second mystery novel.

Game Plans

Go beyond gamification’s badges and leaderboards with the new edition of the book, first published in 2011, that helped transform education. Going far beyond the first edition of The Multiplayer Classroom, forthrightly examining what worked and what didn’t over years of development, here are the tools to design any structured learning experience as a game to engage your students, raise their grades, and ensure their attendance. Suitable for use in the classroom or the boardroom, this book features a reader-friendly style that introduces game concepts and vocabulary in a logical way. Also included are case studies, both past and present, from others teaching in their own multiplayer classrooms around the world. You don't need any experience making games or even playing games to use this book. You don’t even need a computer. Yet, you will join many hundreds of educators who have learned how to create multiplayer games for any age on any subject. Lee Sheldon began his writing career in television as a writer-producer, eventually writing more than 200 shows ranging from Charlie’s Angels (writer) to Edge of Night (head writer) to Star Trek: The Next Generation (writer-producer). Having written and designed more than 40 commercial and applied video games, Lee spearheaded the first full writing for games concentration in North America at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the second writing concentration at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he is now a professor of practice. Lee is a regular lecturer and consultant on game design and writing in the United States and abroad. His most recent commercial game, the award-winning The Lion’s Song, is currently on Steam.

A golfer disappearing into thin air from a sand trap is more than new police chief Dan Shepard bargained for when he left the big city for the supposedly quiet resort town of Carmel, California. "Let me get this straight," Shepard said. "Not only does the victim vanish from the scene of the crime, and wind up someplace he really can't be, but somewhere along the way he changed his socks?" As if that problem wasn't enough, Shepard also has to contend with the constant interference of an irascible amateur sleuth, Herman de Portola Bliss. Bliss is an artist with no talent for painting, but an unerring eye for clues, and an even greater talent for getting into trouble. As the case twists and turns its way along the shores of scenic Monterey Bay, the mismatched pair finds themselves drawn into an edgy partnership confronted with more than one dead body. Even Bliss may not be good enough for this one.

Lee Sheldon

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