Blog Archives
Game Closure launches free tools for anyone to build fast mobile-web games
This could be a great tool for teachers and others who are interested in making learning games.
8 More Game Portals to Find The Right Games for Your Lessons
It is always helpful to find the right games for lessons! Thanks for the post.
We’ve put together “6 Sites to Find The Right Games for Your Lessons“, now here are 8 more sites to find the right games. It’s exciting to see more efforts to help teachers integrating games into learning.
Survey of Electronic Games that Teach
Check out www.wingz2fly.com and select “Search” on the right. You can see information about 1500+ educational computer games. (It will soon be moved to www.i-elearn.org.)
In this project, we have searched for effectiveness studies that have been conducted on educational games that teach and we have searched for any findings those studies may have come to. Dr. Carol L. Redfield, professor of Computer Science at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, has done similar research on games that were available to teach or practice concepts in K-12 curriculum in the 1990s. She found then that there was only one software tool that had any effectiveness…
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EdGamer discusses the top 10 video games of 2012 – (and which ones teachers can use)
EdGamer is one of my favorite podcasts. The host, Zack Gilbert, and show contributor, Gerry James, are teachers who play games and use games in the classroom. They have interviewed some of the leading researchers, practitioners, and experts on educational gaming (Dr. James Paul Gee, Dr. Jeremiah McCall, Dr. Lucas Gillispie, Dr. Crystle Martin, Sylvia Martinez, Joel Levin, and Jeff Holmes). This is a great podcast for teachers, parents, and researchers. In the future, I plan to post and discuss their conversations here on Gaming and education. On EdGamer #83, The guys discuss Mashable’s Top 10 Video Games of 2012 and they discus which games teachers may use – and which games they should definitely not use in the classroom. They also give a shout out to yours truly! Thanks guys! I love what you are doing – keep up the good work!
To listen to EdGamer #83 click here
http://edreach.us/2013/01/05/edgamer-83-can-teachers-use-the-top-10-video-games-of-2012/
Computer game players are better at reasoning and short-term memory
“After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, a Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one’s intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading.
The findings from the landmark study, which included more than 100,000 participants, were published today in the journal Neuron. The article, “Fractionating human intelligence,” was written by Adrian M. Owen and Adam Hampshire from Western’s Brain and Mind Institute (London, Canada) and Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, Science Museum Group (London, U.K)….
With so many respondents, the results also provided a wealth of new information about how factors such as age, gender and the tendency to play computer games influence our brain function…
Intriguingly, people who regularly played computer games did perform significantly better in terms of both reasoning and short-term memory.”
To read more on this research click here
learn more and relieve stress through video games
Matt Johnston wrote about a Professor who affirms the power of video games.
“Johnny Nhan, an assistant professor of criminal justice and a part-time gamer, said that depending on the game being played, playing video games could be good. ”
To read the whole article click here.
Related articles
- Daphne Bavelier: Your brain on video games (lugenfamilyoffice.com)
Gamification at Khan Academy
According to Karen Bryan, the Khan Academy employs some of the elements of gamification to keep learners engaged and motivated.
“Khan said that when he began to make his videos public, he expected that they would attract only the highly self-motivated learners. What he found, though, is that it’s become popular with a wide variety of students, from high achievers to students who are on the verge of failing their classes. On the surface, the skill trees are a type of extrinsic reward, and there’s incentive to keep watching videos and taking assessment tests just to see the next box fill in on your tree. But at the same time, users are intrinsically drawn to the site, and their primary motivation for using Khan Academy is actually the method of instruction itself. Millions of people have viewed the videos, and as the staff continues to translate the tutorials, even more people will be able to access the content on the site.”
To read the full article by Karen Bryan, click here.
Educational Games in Denmark
Jan Gejel describes some of the opportunities and challenges for educational games in an article entitled “You Got Game! Learning Games and Games in Learning” for the International Conference The Future of Education. Gejel is the European project manager at Aarhus Social and Healthcare College in Denmark. This article explores important questions related to the future of games in education, particularly; why there are not more of these games, how will these games be paid for, and how might young developers and educational institutions work together. This article is helpful for understanding the serious gaming context in Europe, in general, and Scandinavia, in particular.
Here are some highlights (to read the full article following the link at the end).
“In Europe the interest in learning games emerged in the beginning of the last decade. Again, the interest in games was a result of the increasing interest in technology in education: internet, software, e-learning, etc. Nevertheless, the explosion of the video games market did not at all result in the creation of games for education, of learning games. Still in 2012 very few quality learning games have been developed in Europe and the worlds of video games and education are still not in any kind of dialogue – apart from very few exceptions.”
“The video game market of entertainment games has grown at an incredible speed throughout the last decades, now worth the double of the film industry.”
“. . . now researchers and game developers are discussing what learning potentials are included in the very activity of gaming itself, and thus in the very design of video games, serious or commercial. It is being debated that the very design of computer games, no matter the content, represents a very powerful learning process, due to the basic design elements in video games. The focus is thus shifted from the entertaining form of video games to the learning potentials of the gaming itself. This shift caused a tremendous upswing in the interest in learning games and for the first time in Europe educational players joined the discussions and they showed a serious interest in games for education.”
“Dramatic different business models must be developed, if education should exploit the learning potentials of gaming. Real encounters between the game world and the educational world must be organized, on an ongoing basis, through which (young) game developers and teachers and institutions can meet and develop mutual platforms of collaboration.”
To read the full article, by Jan Gejel, click Here.
Game developer explores the persuasive power of Games
Tadhg Kelly wrote a very compelling article on the limits of the persuasive power of games for TechCrunch. Here are a few parts that I found particularly insightful.
“The root of the persuasive-game idea is that interactivity is better than passivity, and so by encouraging users to do stuff you likely imprint them with an idea more successfully. Largely this is assumed to be true because it sounds very positive on the one hand, and something that could be profitable on the other. The educational and computer-based training sectors rest upon it, as do the emerging fields of socially conscious games.”
Kelly is not so convince of this. He goes on to write;
“Of course games can educate. Monopoly accidentally teaches its players about ideas like property rental, ownership, rates and income taxes. You don’t really realise it, but years later these ideas turn out to be useful. Scrabble teaches spelling and vocabulary without ever making a big deal of it. It’s just the skill you need to win the game . . . The Settlers of Catan expands your understanding of resource management. Risk teaches geography (every Risk player knows that there’s a place in Asia named Kamchatka).”
Regardless of whether it is “accidental” or not learning takes place when people play games. Kelly goes on to make several excellent observations about how games that are too preachy, commercial, or just badly designed are not persuasive. This is all true of course, but the right solution is to design better games.
Read the full article by Tadhg Kelly on TechCrunch by clicking here
Four things games teach teachers
Anna Malczyk details four things that games teach teachers; how to make learning fun, how to motivate learners, how to foster teamwork and cooperation, and how to set meaningful challenges.
“Gaming and education are often seen as two extremes of a spectrum — the one is a frivolous pastime while the other is a serious, valuable activity. At the same time, we instinctively know that playing and learning are linked somehow — after all, children and young animals use play to acquire the vital skills they’ll need for survival in the grown-up world.”
Read the full article on Memeburn
http://memeburn.com/2012/09/4-things-gaming-can-teach-education/
More students and teachers learn with the game Portal
Here are more videos on students learning through the video game Portal.
Enjoy!
I found these videos at one of my favorite places – The Singularity Hub.
Gaming and Education 