GameCareer.com has an article by Lindsay Grace in Educational Fantasy. This articles explores the idea of the fantasy setting and its necessary role in creating an engaging and entertaining experience. ”[Fantasy] is probably one of the greatest single challenges facing educational game design. How can the practical matters of education intersect the enveloping fantasy we expect from [...]
This NY Times article portrays a lawyer who worked 20 years helping inmates on death row. He gave up a high salary to become a middle school teacher “having seen too many people at the end of lives gone wrong, and wanting to keep these students from ending up like his former clients. He quotes [...]
Kosmosis is a Communism themed space arcade game from Molleindustria, designers of the excellent McDonald’s Game parody. You play a space revolutionary and you have to organize your fellow proletariates. An especially intriguing aspect is the way your comrades move automatically like a flock of birds. As your group of comrades grow, the group starts to [...]
Here is an interesting paper written by the designers of the educational game Europe-2045. The game is a simulation of the economies and politics of the European Union and the project was to develop a computer game for use in high school. The authors summarize prior research in educational games, and then discuss their experiences [...]
I’ve been reading a bit about Joe Renzulli and I like his Three Ring concept of Giftedness. According to Renzulli, there are three important factors for the development of gifted behaviour: Above average ability, creativity, and task commitment. Renzulli defines Creativity as the fluency, flexibility, and originality of thought, an openness to experience, sensitivity to stimulations, and [...]
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a very useful website for Teaching Copyright issues. It is an excellent resource for teachers on a tricky subject. The website covers the issues in a balanced way I feel—it clearly states downloading copyrighted music without permission is illegal. However many of the subtle areas of fair use are discussed [...]
Arcademic Skill Builders is a website with a few dozen excellent Flash games for teaching math and English Language Arts skills. I played Dirt Bike Proportions, a math game where you answer questions about fractions in order to go faster and beat friends in a race. I was quite impressed with the quality of the [...]
The EduGamesBlog lists ten significant serious games. The games cover important social topics rather than academic skills. For example SimCity is the classic urban planning game and Re-Mission helps cancer patients understand their condition. Some of them are online/Flash games, but others are Windows-only downloads which need to be installed.
Here is a great article on how to integrate off the shelf commercial video games into classrooms. Richard Van Eck gives his method for evaluating a game to see if it would be useful for a particular learning outcome, and then how to augment commercial games to better achieve your learning goal. http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume41/DigitalGameBasedLearningItsNot/158041
Flash Math Creativity is a book of programs that use relatively simple math and Flash to create digital art. I bought it years ago, and recently realized that it has a website that illustrates all the programs. Take a look: http://www.friendsofed.com/fmc/FMCv2/FMC.html
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