Shotgun Diaries: The Mechanical Hound Mod

     I had just finished teaching Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and wanted to enrich the reading a bit with some exciting character interaction. It was time to turn the mechanical hounds of the novel on the students with the help of John Wick’s lethal little game of zombie survival, Shotgun Diaries.

Here is the procedure:

• Students read the novel.
• Students read the rules concerning survivor types.
• Students create survivor types based on the main characters of the novel, complete with specific skills.
• The teacher assesses the students’ understanding the novel’s characters.
• Students read the rest of the rules.
• The teacher quizzes the students’ comprehension of the rules. 
• The students play the game.
• The teacher watches to see if the rules are played correctly as a way to assess reading comprehension.
• Most of the characters die.
• The teacher and the students reflect on the game and the congruency of the novel’s characters with their own versions of the same in relation to their behavior in the game.

RAY BRADBURY’S TYPEWRITER

     Ray Bradbury says that when he wrote Fahrenheit 451 he used a library computer that gave  him a certain amount of minutes of typing time for a dime. He fed the machine dime after dime, writing in small blasts of rushed inspiration. The result: an awesome book. How might we as teachers use these types of writer recollections as games to facilitate creative writing? Share your techniques here.