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Via Edchat Interactive "Ryan Schaff and Keri Engel just published a free Learning with Digital Games white paper. It contains instructions on what successes teachers and students are having with Digital Games, how they can be, and are, integrated in curriculum, and compare and contrast the various platforms digital games are played on and their potential for individual, small-group, or large-scale digital gamebased learning implementation."
Via Jim Lerman
Many children enjoy playing video games, yet they offer distinct challenges and opportunities arising from their ability to tell stories, invite participation, create imaginary worlds and connect players.
Gameful design embraces incremental implementations of proven intrinsic motivators while it acknowledges, accentuates, and builds on the work that good instructors do as second nature.
Victorian government school students will have access to a classroom version of the popular game Minecraft, created to immerse students in various Minecraft worlds to promote creativity, problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration.
Celebrating diversity and inclusivity in games and gaming communities
In an era of rapid technological change, experimentation, and innovation, four tools can help higher education leaders decide where to invest their ti
With more than half of the world population living in cities, one thing is undeniable: we are an urban species. Part game, part urban planning sketching tool, "Cities: Skylines" encourages people to use their creativity and self-expression to rethink the cities of tomorrow. Designer Karoliina Korppoo takes us on a tour through some extraordinary places users have created, from futuristic fantasy cities to remarkably realistic landscapes. What does your dream city look like?
New gaming headsets promise to seamlessly integrate the digital and the physical world, but they also typically limit the vision of those digital objects to the person wearing the headset.
Frankenstein200 puts players in the middle of the action in a story where Mary Shelley’s classic tale collides with modern science. Perform experiments, explore hidden areas of research, and assist a pair of young scientists as they unravel a mystery in a cutting-edge digital experience.
Press the PLAY button to enter the world of Frankenstein200!
PLAY NOW!
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1516684. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
This special feature showcases a learner-controlled Articulate Storyline 3 eLearning course. The course uses game elements to simulate a learner's journey.
If you’ve ever caught yourself spending hours sorting digital playing cards, trying to avoid mines, or exploding pieces of candy on a screen, you know just how engaging digital games can be. When used in educational settings, digital games have the power to immerse students in a rich learning environment.
Minecraft is one such game used by educators from kindergarten to higher education. It drops the player into an infinitely customizable world of blocks, animals, and monsters where players (and teachers) can set their own goals. And many students already play this game, which means teachers have the opportunity to transfer students’ skills into an academic context.
Everything you need to get started
Unity Personal is a great place for beginners and hobbyists to get started. It includes access to all core game engine features, continuous updates, beta releases, and all publishing platforms.
Students across the country are learning about climate change in senior high school years, as laid out in the Australian curriculum.
But according to researchers at the Australian National University, waiting until students are 16 is too late.
ANU science researcher Inez Harker-Schuch is developing an interactive online game called CO2peration, for children aged 12 to 14 to learn about climate science.
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To ensure that students learn about online privacy and data security, high school English language arts teachers John Fallon in Connecticut and Paul Darvasi (who also reports for MindShift) in Toronto co-created Blind Protocol, an alternate reality game. ARGs blend fiction with the real world by creating narratives and puzzles that take participants deeper into the story by way of their actions. Fallon and Darvasi’s ARG goal was not to inform students on how to actually hack or spy; rather, they use game tactics to teach about the vulnerability of their data.
Highlights
• A randomised controlled trial was used to assess effects of playing video games.
• Previously validated self-report instruments were used to measure graduate skills.
• Game play improved student communication skill, resourcefulness and adaptability.
• Video games may have a role to play in higher education.
At Bottom-Line Performance, we have a “learning game design peer group” that meets a few times per year. I started the group three years ago to help build game design skills and to foster deeper knowledge of the power of games as learning tools. People who design games need to play games to gain perspective and understanding of core dynamics, game mechanics, and game elements and how these all weave together to create a good or poor game experience.
Here are three great games we have played within our peer group. All three are commercially available; one is marketed explicitly as a learning game. I’ve made a few comments about each one to help people understand the value of playing and evaluating the game design of each one
People who pursue the "Settlement Generation Challenge" are being asked to write adaptive code that will on its own create a settlement for a given, unknown Minecraft map. Then, during the evaluation process, submitted algorithms will be run on three other previously unseen maps. The results will be judged not by a computer but by humans: a panel of experts that includes game designers, urbanists and architects. The judging criteria: adaptation to the environment (for example, does the settlement take advantage of the terrain?), functionality (does it keep mobs out?), narrative integration (could somebody looking at the settlement describe how it's different from other settlements?) and visual aesthetics (does it look believable?).
The researcher demonstrates Rushdie’s own experience with videogames as a way to stay occupied during his exile and as a way to stay connected with his sons (Rushdie dedicated Luka to his youngest son, Milan). Through quotations from Rushdie, the researcher shows his explicit interest in experimenting with the structure of videogames for storytelling. The author points out that videogames are especially relevant for storytelling, because users create their own characters and narratives within the game. The reader might recognize tropes such as characters creating their own fictions, multi-level challenges, temporality of death, and allusions to a variety of world mythologies, cultures, and religions, not only from video games, but also from other novels in the literary gaming genre, such as works by Orson Scott Card and Suzanne Collins.
Educators around the world are using Minecraft: Education Edition to teach concepts like coding, reimagining fairy tales, building habitable colonies on Mars and modeling renewable sources of energy. As educators begin to explore ways to use Minecraft to create richer and deeper learning experiences, we turned to some of Global Minecraft Mentors to garner tips …
Videogames offer a range of educational benefits in English classrooms, University of Melbourne research has discovered.
Practical barriers can keep the most enthusiastic teacher from using games in the classroom. Let’s get real — and realistic — about ways to approach game-based learning for the classroom. Teachers are busy, and usually spend much of a given school day completing work from that day while simultaneously preparing work for the next day.
So how, then, do teachers find the games to use in class, play the entire game to understand what and how it teaches, and review best practices? Often, they don’t. Here’s a more realistic approach to using the power of game-based learning in the classroom.
One of the things that I emphasize to students before they embark on any kind of research or problem-solving task is to take a good long look at the information that they already have before them. To that end, I'll often request that they construct a list of what they know about a topic or problem before they begin to search. Playing one of the following three Google Maps-based games is a fun way to reinforce the concept of using prior knowledge and observations.
New research shows your ability to play certain computer games is linked to your intelligence.
Elizabeth LaPensée created Thunderbird Strike to protest pipeline construction on Indigenous land.
When teachers used digital educational games in the classroom, students raised test scores by more than half a letter grade in only three weeks, according to a study from researchers at Vanderbilt University and partners at Legends of Learning, a research-driven educational game platform.
The new research, published by the Journal of the Learning Sciences, demonstrates the benefits of game-based learning for students when compared to students who had no access to such games.
“Substantial Integration of Typical Educational Games into Extended Curricula” involved more than 1,000 students of 13 teachers in 10 diverse urban, suburban and rural schools in seven states.
The educators integrated a standards-aligned set of 55 typical educational games into their curricula. Each teacher taught at least one class with the games and one class without.
The research found students in the classes with the games outperformed their peers on essay and multiple choice questions.
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