Educate

Global Kids is a youth education and leadership development organization that facilitates civic engagement and international affairs programs in high schools throughout New York City. During the 2007-2008 school year, Global Kids trainers worked with a group of students in Canarsie High School and the video game lab Game Pill to produce Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City.

Tempest is meant to be a fun adventure game that also expresses meaningful, accurate historical truths. There are three main educational goals for the game:

• Teach players about how everyday residents of New Orleans acted heroically to help each other. This is a celebration of New Orleans residents and their culture.
• Emphasize what are perhaps the two most important priorities in any disaster: communication, and use of local resources, needs, and knowledge. The relief effort in Hurricane Katrina was severely hampered by the poor communication between government agencies and through most media outlets. Top down disaster management also led responders to ignore local resources and knowledge that could have saved many lives. Even in the aftermath local needs and wishes are largely being ignored during rebuilding.
• Draw attention to the continuing struggle in New Orleans as residents fight for housing in 2008. The city was destroyed by negligence, and now it’s being rebuilt without homes for many of its most loyal residents.
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  The Hurricane Katrina disaster exposed a number of different crises in American society, and as such it presents a number of learning opportunities. Global Kids designed Hurricane Katrina: Tempest in Crescent City to both stand independently and serve as a tool in a larger curriculum to explore these issues. Educators can use the game to stimulate discussion and play it as part of our Online Workshop, or use the Offline Workshop independently of the game.
  
  In addition, other organizations have produced their own excellent curricula, unrelated to our game, to explore the issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina.
  
  

• Global Kids Workshops
• Tempest in Crescent City Online Workshop
  Global Kids workshop to be used in conjunction with Tempest in Crescent City.
• Tempest in Crescent City Offline Workshop
  Global Kids workshop which can be used without playing Tempest in Crescent City or as a supplement to the online workshop.
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• Other Organizations' Workshops
• Teaching the Levees
  A resource to support democratic dialogue and civic engagement created by educators from Teachers College, Columbia is a curriculum based on Spike Lee’s film 'When The Levees Broke'.
• An Unnatural Disaster (pdf)
  A critical resource guide for addressing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the classroom developed by The New York Collective of Radical Educators (www.nycore.org).