Time is running out. Having a clock and a deadline can be a good thing to get things done. A bit of pressure helps to motivate. So with the clock ticking away I have to make something for the third cycle in the Connected Learning MOOC and this is the medium that I've chosen to explore. Thanks for being here and now it's time for a little bit of interaction. [[In the beginning]] [[Dive in to the middle]] [[Skip to the end]]You're at a camp beside a lake. You're young and listening to the adults (your mom and dad and aunts and uncles and grandparents laughing and talking). They're playing games on this warm summer night. Card games are played most of the time. But sometimes crokinole is played with the round board with a hole in the centre. Wooden discs that are pinged towards the middle. During the day and when fewer people are around you play and practice. Games are social and the best way to learn is by playing with someone more experienced. [[Board Games]] [[Pool]] [[Sports]]As I got older and moved out on my own there were the computer-based games that started to happen. [[Bowling]] was a fun thing to do with friends and family. [[Videogames]] were a lot of fun.Now there aren't a lot of games that I play, but there are some very neat [[casual games]] that I play on my iPhone from time to time. But with games I keep thinking about the structure and the interactions how. It's fascinating to think of learning as a game with a structure and interactions. Moving along a path and gathering knowledge to be able to complete tasks. It's fun to learn and face challenges and use your experience to build mastery of different things. I want to build more fun in to my teaching and learning to have it feel more like a game. It's good to explore and enjoy and share and #clmooc is kind of a big loosely structured game that helps me improve my teaching game.Playing board games became something quite fun to do. It's a family thing with gathering people together and enjoying the game and the company. A game provides a structure for interaction and laughter. The games I remember playing were Trouble and Payday and Sorry. Later Monopoly came into the family and it provided hours of fun and a much more complicated game. It wasn't played as often because it took some time to set up and to understand and explain the rules.One small fun time with my cousins who had a pool table was playing pool. It was fun to hit the ball around and later I played a bit at bars. I enjoyed the social and mathematical aspect of it. Trying to figure out the way to set it all up, but was never really good or competitive at it. As far as I can remember I only really played a couple of team sports outside of school. Running happened in school and relay races which were kind of fun, but I never really participated that much. I played a bit of t-ball which wasn't that much fun. There was so much waiting around playing that version of softball that I was bored and I was always in the outfield, so I didn't really get to do that much. Soccer was the sport I played for one summer, but I was bored with that too. I would get distracted and not notice the action and there was a lot of running back and forth, so that was the last organized sport I played. Later [[Biking]] became the individual sport that I loved in a self-competitive way.While not being that physically active with sports, the one thing that I did as a kid and fell in love with later is biking. Now biking is a way to spend time being physically active and to get around and to also have a challenge. Now I track everything so I have the time and data of how fast I move, where I go, and my heart rate. Using things like Strava can provide challenges and let me know when I have a personal best at doing something too. That is fun. Riding my bike is a chance to explore the world around me while being active. It's the best of all possible worlds. It's like a game to see and hear and smell as I move around and see things. Through the apps I use there is a trace preserved and it's like exploring a map in a game, except this is in the world.Bowling has always been a lot of fun. It's physical and social and I was lucky enough to live relatively close to a bowling alley growing up. My dad played in a bowling league, so he would take us out bowling from time to time too. Later I bowled a bit with friends and enjoyed the sounds and smells of the bowling alley and the combination of physical activity and competition. I haven't been bowling in years, but want to get back to that at some point and it would be neat to see how it feels now. Now you can go back again to [[Dive in to the middle]] or [[Skip to the end]] if you are feeling impatient.Sitting in my grandparents' living room I looked at the tv with a black and white image on it with two paddles a dot as a ball and it bounced from one to another. My grandfather Brown was fascinated with technology and would build all sorts of things. He had calculators and all sorts of electronic stuff and he had an early home Pong game that I played. This was the late 70s and early 80s when videogames began to take off. When I was in Junior High and then High School I spent a lot of money on videogames. I don't know where I got the money and spending 25 cents a game seems expensive now, but I loved playing those games in an arcade. Tempest was my favourite. There was also Asteroids and Space Invaders and Galaga and later, Star Wars. So much fun. I saved up money from my job in retail and bought an Atari Video Computer System (later called the Atari 2600) so I could have my own games at home. I loved playing Pinball and spent many hours playing Pitfall which I also drew out maps of to figure out how to get through it. So much fun exploring and figuring out the mechanics of it. Some of the later joy of Minecraft was in the exploring there. Now you can [[Skip to the end]] to see how it all goes into the present day.With my iPhone I started to play lots of small and simple games to pass the time while waiting or at the end of the day. One of the first casual games I played a lot was Angry Birds which occupied a lot of my time. One of the most beautiful and magical casual games is Monument Valley. In it you explore a world and there is a story behind it as you learn how to move through the puzzles and work with the complicated machines in the world to complete it. But now my current favourite casual game is Alto's Adventure which is a simple game with characters snowboarding down a mountain to catch llamas and perform trick jumps along the way. It's simple and beautiful, which is great for a casual game. I love the idea of trying to replicate this type of experience in the classroom. A fun experience where you focus and work at something for a while as you figure it out with small rewards along the way. It makes learning more fun. Now you can [[Skip to the end]].