The teacher’s experience and expertise is particularly crucial.
This is where collaboration between teachers (mentoring) is needed. (See for example how Eric mentored the other 3 teachers: Eric’s class, Linda’s class, Paola’s class and Sara’s class)
The teacher needs to understand the game in order to share and plan what students are doing within it, and be able to translate game progress to curriculum progress and learning goals.(Ros’class and Huda’s class)
The teacher also needs to be skilled at setting up gameplay sessions in a limited amount of preparation time.(Tom’s class)
Teachers also serve the important role of anchoring the game sessions as learning activities, so they need to know how to contextualize the game content in the subject matter being taught (or vice versa). (see examples of Jon’s class)
The process of a game being designed and then played can also be used
to evaluate student progress through the curriculum. For example, if you notice a student has become very knowledgeable of something inside the game or is using new ways to problem solve, you need to be able to “translate” that knowledge to progress in the curriculum. By using an existing game as a sandbox to work on and ’correct’ the girls were more confident in tackling their own new games but also accepted criticism more easily. (Ros’ class)