If there's one thing I like more than video games, it's zombies. I've been a horror movie junkie for as long as I can remember, and so I've just about grown up with the living dead. And today, zombies are "in". Between TV shows like
"The Walking Dead" and movies like the upcoming Brad Pitt zombie thriller
"World War Z" (itself based upon the
vastly superior book by Max Brooks) and Twilightesque
"Warm Bodies", zombies are enjoying a popularity boom not seen since the 1970s.
So, what does that have to do with education, you ask? Well, as it happens, someone has managed to squash the two together into one great gooey grey gob of learning. David Hunter, a teacher in Seattle, Washington, designed a comprehensive, standards-based course that uses a zombie apocalypse as a framework for teaching geography, and launched a Kickstarter project to raise funds to develop it. Over 350 backers donated nearly $12000 for Hunter to build the course, with an accompanying graphic novel. Since then, Hunter has launched
"Zombie-Based Learning" website, where for $9.95 a month, teachers have access to the course materials needed to teach geography in a whole new way.
"Zombie-Based Learning" teaches skills like map reading (for mapping out the progress of the zombies), mental mapping (used to consider strategies for supply gathering), and community planning (for rebuilding civilization once the threat is over.) With teachers constantly looking for new ways to engage their students, I think it's fantastic to see a teacher really going outside of the box to infect kids with knowledge.
