NC State Ph.D. student and Wake County, N.C., high school teacher Michael Prelaske is helping students through game-based learning and scholarships. He is the founder of 1347 Games, a nonprofit focused on creating standards-based, multiplayer, digital simulations for the classroom. “Learning takes place through stories and play,” says Prelaske, who has taught at Middle Creek High School in Apex, N.C., since 2014. “There’s very little play incorporated into the modern social studies curriculum, because it’s really difficult to play with complex topics.” Prelaske is working to change that.
He’s currently pursuing a Ph.D. in learning sciences and for the past 10 years has been incorporating simulation games into his classes. His newest digital role-playing games place students on a trade ship during the Age of Exploration or a feudalist farm in pre-Norman England. Prelaske describes the simulations as a bit like Oregon Trail, where players make decisions and consider risks while learning about logistics, geography and behavioral science.
When he’s not focused on making learning more fun, Prelaske works to make the profession more desirable. While teaching can be “very rewarding,” he says that North Carolina is facing a massive teacher shortage. To help remove some of the hurdles for future educators, he and three teaching colleagues — Kenny Collishaw ’17 MED, Nick Flohr and Eddie Wasdell — formed the nonprofit Old North Education Foundation. They hold fundraising events and even partner with distilleries to create customized bourbon that is sold to raise funds for scholarships.
In the past two years, they’ve raised nearly $100,000 to support North Carolina students who want to study education, including at least two who attend NC State. “This is a way for us to do something fun together, to give back and encourage future teachers,” he says. You don’t need an endowment or big bank account to bring about change, Prelaske says, “You just have to go do it.”
Photograph by Joshua Steadman
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