I recently read an article in Forbes magazine titled College is Dead According to the New Book ‘Leveraged Learning’.  With a title like that, it garnered my immediate attention.  I obviously don’t believe college is dead.  My assumption was the article would be about how teaching and learning need to be disrupted.  The book Leveraged Learning by Danny Iny is a critique of the ways society views education, how college is not providing its promised returns for the multitudes of struggling students, and the inefficiencies associated with modern college education.  In the article, Iny is quoted as saying:

Every semester in almost every class I utilize game-based learning to convey economic and statistical concepts.  I look for games that can improve and activate the learning environment.  There is no question at this point regarding the positive correlations between comprehension and game-based learning.  In fact, the implementation of games has occurred within not just academic settings, but also within the military and business (Deterding, Dixon, et al., 2011).  As the research evolves on how to pivot away from traditional, lecture-based teaching, the use of games becomes increasingly important in terms of the impact on problem-solving and improved critical thinking (Kapp, 2012).

As a result of a colleague's suggestion (thanks Shweta!), this semester I used the game of Taboo as a foundation for teaching various economic concepts.  Taboo is a game developed in 1989 which has the objective of requiring players to have partners guess a word or phrase on the player’s card without using the word or phrase itself.  Read more about the game of Taboo.