Searching for "video games"

Best Apps Games and Sites of the Last Year

Mobile: Best Apps, Games and Sites of the Last Year

https://thejournal.com/Articles/2016/01/05/Best-AppsGames-and-Sites-of-the-Last-Year.aspx

GameMaker: Studio
Grades: 5–12
Pricing: Free, paid
Concepts: Digital creation, programming and coding, game design

GameMaker: Studio is a robust game-making tool that appeals to both entry-level novices and game-development pros alike.

The Orchestra
Grades: 6–12
Pricing: $13.99
Concepts: Music theory, memorization, listening, part-whole relationships

The Orchestra is an interactive iPad app for exploring classical music, the orchestra and orchestral instruments.

WonderBox
Grades: 2–8
Pricing: Free
Concepts: Design, geography, curiosity, imagination, making new creations

As its name suggests, WonderBox is an app that piques kids’ natural curiosity through video, drawing, taking pictures, messaging with family and friends and engaging in multistep challenges.

A.D.A.M. Interactive Anatomy Online
Grades: 9–12
Pricing: Free to try, paid
Concepts: Anatomy, biology, memorization, part-whole relationships

A.D.A.M. Interactive Anatomy Online is a 3D visualization and curriculum-development tool all about the human body. Teachers can select and create assignments that allow students to manipulate 3D images of the human body.

Construct 2
Grades: 7–12
Pricing: Free, paid
Concepts: Digital creation, programming and coding, game design

Construct 2 is a Web-based 2D game-creation tool for students and teachers who want to get into game design without the need to know programming languages.

Fruity Fractions
Grades: 1–3
Pricing: $2.99
Concepts: Fractions, part-whole relationships

Set in a tropical jungle full of brightly colored fruit and animated birds, Fruity Fractions teaches fractions concepts to kids in first through third grades.

games and learning

Four Inventive Games That Show Us the Future of Learning

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2015/11/26/four-inventive-games-that-show-us-the-future-of-learning

Earth Primer

Designed by Chaim Gingold, a Ph.D. student at UC Santa Cruz, indie developer and designer of Spore’s creature creator, “Earth Primer” is a reinvention of the textbook. Unlike the all-too-familiar “interactive textbooks” that are little more than pictures and animations tacked on to traditional text, “Earth Primer” starts from the ground up. It’s elegantly presented and paced.

Metamorphabet

Patrick Smith, the designer behind “Metamorphabet,” is like the games equivalent of a toymaker.

Extrasolar

Money and time are the two most common barriers to using games in the classroom. “Extrasolar” solves both while also striking pedagogical gold: authentic, self-motivated learning. It’s a free alternate reality game (ARG) that mimics the day-to-day life of a rover driver exploring an alien planet for a mysterious space agency. Rather than placing players in some fantastical world, they interact with what looks like a typical desktop interface, giving their rover commands, and waiting to receive photographs and data from the alien world as well as messages from their employer. Each bit of play requires only a few minutes of activity. The wait builds tension, and when matched with the relatively mundane interface and tasks, it doesn’t feel like a game — which is kind of the point. Best of all: It’s all based in real science and, like with any good ARG, has a healthy dose of mystery to give players a reason to return.

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

http://twinery.org//

You don’t need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready.

Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.

Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several differentrepositories.

https://www.graphite.org/ – reviews and ratings for educational materials

immersive journalism, games, and empathy

Virtual reality breathes life into immersive storytelling

http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/01/virtual-reality-breathes-life-into-immersive-storytelling/

Virtual Games Try To Generate Real Empathy For Faraway Conflict

James Delahoussaye

Project Syria, a virtual reality experience built by a team of students at USC.

“I sometimes call virtual reality an empathy generator,” she says. “It’s astonishing to me. People all of a sudden connect to the characters in a way that they don’t when they’ve read about it in the newspaper or watched it on TV.”

What Peña’s doing — using virtual reality in combination with reporting — is part of a wider landscape of video games being created to explore the news. And they’re called, appropriately enough, “newsgames.”

“There’s an argument to be made that games are perfect at getting at the systemic problems and challenges in the world,” says Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech.

He says games are really good at showing the complex underbelly of stories.

Take a game that he helped make called Oil God. In the game, the player controls an oil-rich region, waging wars and inciting coupes. The player learns that oil prices are contingent on all sorts of factors rarely mentioned in a story about the price of a gallon of gas.

The Sociology of Videogames

http://sociologyofvideogames.com/2015/01/25/can-video-games-create-empathy-and-awareness-for-real-world-issues/

creating games to bring awareness to social issues for over a decade.  The game to create the biggest waves was arguably MTV’s “Darfur is Dying” released online in 2006, in which players took up the role of a family displaced by conflict in Darfur.

Games in the Classroom

Some Struggles Teachers Face Using Games in the Classroom

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/11/24/some-struggles-teachers-face-using-games-in-the-classroom/

the Joan Ganz Cooney Center found that 74 percent of K-8 teachers surveyed use digital games for instruction in some way and 55 percent use them weekly.

Confused About Ed Tech Tools? New Rating Site for Apps and Games

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/09/for-overwhelmed-educators-new-site-rates-ed-tech-tools/

Video Games That Bring Civics Class to Life

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/10/09/video-games-that-bring-civics-class-to-life/

MIT Education Arcade: http://education.mit.edu/

LGN Learning Games Network: http://learninggamesnetwork.org/about

 

games and psychometrics

Could Video Games Measure Skills That Tests Can’t Capture?

http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/08/11/could-video-games-measure-skills-that-tests-cant-capture/

applying the mechanics of games to the science of psychometrics — the measurement of the mind.

Scholars like James Paul Gee believe video games actually come much closer to capturing the learning process in action than traditional fill-in-the-bubble tests. My note: Duh...

Schwartz’s theory of assessment focuses on choice. He argues that the ultimate goal of education is to create independent thinkers who make good decisions. And so we need assessments that test how students think, not what they happen to know at a given moment.

more on games and gamification in this IMS blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=gaming

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=gamification

grants for games

Jumpstarting Innovation in Education Technology through SBIR

http://ies.ed.gov/blogs/research/post/Jumpstarting-Innovation

The U.S. Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research program, operated out of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), funds projects to develop education technology products designed to support student learning and teacher practice in general or special education.

Recently, ED/IES SBIR announced its 2015 awards. There are 21 awards in all, covering a range of topics and forms of technology. For example, Zaption is designing a mobile app to help teachers integrate video into science instruction; Speak Agent is building an app to help students with speech disabilities to communicate; and Lingo Jingo is developing a platform to help teachers guide English learners. (To view short video demos of the eight new Phase II projects, see this playlist.)

The 2015 awards highlight two trends that have emerged in the ED/IES SBIR portfolio in recent years –games for learning and bridging the research-to-practice gap in education.

Trend #1: Games for Learning

  • Strange Loop Games to build a virtual world to engage students in learning about ecosystems,
  • Kiko Labs to develop mini games to strengthen young children’s thinking and memory skills, and
  • Schell Games to create a futuristic “ball and stick” molecular modeling kit and app to augment chemistry learning.

For a playlist including videos of these games and 19 others out of the ED/IES SBIR program, see here.

The games for learning trend echoes the movement surrounding games in the field, and is highlighted by recent ED sponsored events including ED Games Week in Washington, DC, last September and the Games for Learning Summit in New York City, in April. Both events convened stakeholders to showcase games and discuss the potential barriers and opportunities for collaboration necessary to accelerate the creation of highly effective games for learning. Stay tuned for more information and initiatives on games for learning out of ED’s Office of Technology.

Trend #2: Bridging the Research-to-Practice Gap

  • Mindset Works, which built on results from prior research including a 2002 IES research grant, to successfully propose a 2010 ED/IES SBIR project to develop SchoolKit. This multimedia platform enables broad distribution of the growth mindset intervention which teaches students to understand that intelligence can be developed through effort and learning. SchoolKit is now in use in more than 500 schools across the country, including half the middle schools in Washington, DC.
  • Teachley, which received a 2013 ED/IES SBIR award to develop math game apps and a teacher implementation dashboard building on findings from prior research including a 2010 IES research grant. The intervention is now used in hundreds of schools around the country, and the apps have been downloaded more than 500,000 times.
  • Learning Ovations is building on two prior IES research grants in their 2014 ED/IES SBIR project. The prior IES funding supported the research team as they developed and evaluated an intervention to improve children’s reading outcomes,. This award is supporting the development of an implementation platform to enable large-scale use of this evidence-based intervention across settings. The project is scheduled to end in 2016, after which the platform will be launched.

The new ED/IES SBIR 2015 awards continue the research-to-practice trend. An award to Foundations in Learning furthers basic research from a 2013 National Science Foundation grant (NSF); an award to SimInsights builds on 2005 and 2008 IES research projects and a 2011 Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) research project; and an award to Apprendris advances a prior 2012 IES research project and  prior 2010 and 2013 NSF research projects.

More on Zaption in this blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=zaption

More on games and gamification in this blog:

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=games

https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=gamification

Games and the Brain

This Is Your Brain On Games

http://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/this-is-your-brain-on-games/

“Action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, and vision,” says brain scientist Daphne Bavelier in her TED Talk on the subject.

In February, Italian researchers found that playing fast-paced video games can improve the reading skills of children with dyslexia.

In 2012, scientists at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston found that high school gamers who played video games two hours a day were better at performing virtual surgery than non-gaming medical residents.

Math, Science, History: Games Break Boundaries Between Subjects

Math, Science, History: Games Break Boundaries Between Subjects

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/05/math-science-history-games-break-boundaries-between-subjects-interdisciplinary-learning/

possibilities for a formal Renaissance-Man-Liberal-Arts education remain limited to the elite. The average, or common, student is encouraged to choose majors and institutions that track into a specialized vocation.

MincraftEDU and SimCityEDU provide flexible options for integrating familiar games with traditional classroom curriculum.

The ability to apply knowledge across disciplines is important, but it is not enough. It is important to combine that knowledge with strong social and emotional skills that serve as the foundation for good citizenship in the 21st Century.

The MindShift Guide to Games and Learning

more on gaming in this blog: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/?s=gaming

Minecraft: Games and Gamification

The Minecraft Experience Panel Presentation Games for Change NYC April 24th 2014

http://www.minecraftexperience.net/G4C2014+Panel

Extended Description:

Last year at G4C Nick Fortugno threw some controversy into the conversation about Minecraft by suggesting Minecraft was not a game but a toy. The proposed panel extends that conversation by asking what is the Minecraft experience, can it be defined or categorised and what as game designers and exponents can we take from understanding its zeitgeist and the impact it has had on the serious gaming landscape?

In 2012/23 at both GLS and G4C many presenters made jokes about including the obligatory Minecraft slide and for very good reasons. Minecraft is arguably a game of immense impact. It has been embraced as part of learning programs focussing on seemingly disparate areas from digital citizenship, history, coding and the maker movement. It is probably the first game brought into the classroom by teachers to leverage the out of school groundswell of existing player excitement. It’s impact is multi generational and perhaps more global than any game before it. The fan base and user community/ies are strong and well supported and exemplar of the potential Jim Gee describes for Big G game. This panel proposes to leverage that Big G space in the lead up to Games for Change 2014 and to honor the voices of its players.

Minecraft has been variously described as a game, toy sandpit, learning space, creative environment, virtual world, and game-infused service. But what really are the affordances of this blocky 16 bit program and how can we even begin to define its value to learning? Enter the Minecraft Experience, a global crowdsourced program managed by Bron Stuckey of The Massively Minecraft Project. People engaging in Minecraft activities about the globe are being invited to describe Minecraft in all its contexts and adaptations. The categories for these experiences will emerge from the crowd sourced content as members contribute thoughts, media, resources and questions to build the __Minecraft Experience__ evidence base.

This panel of notable speakers has been drawn together to answer provocative questions about Minecraft’s success and define its relationship to and impact on learning. The panelists have been chosen to represent play in many contexts formal education, informal learning, self-organised learning, schools and non-school contexts. They include game designers, educators, researchers, learners and parents who have each had a personal and professional experience of this and many other games.

Panelists take a position on the Minecraft experience and use the resources provided by members of the project to inform, support and evidence their case.

How are players, educators and researchers invited to contribute?

  • project wiki to prod, poke, stimulate and support crowd sourced content and dialog
  • live youth speakers on the panel
  • social media and wiki activity in lead-up using selected #minecraftproject
  • video inclusions of educators, parents, kids/youth arguments, evidence and questions
  • promotion of youth media pieces from existing YouTube etc to support and stimulate various provocative dialogs
  • livestream of the panel to global contributors with live feedback and questions.

Who could benefit from joining this project and attending the G4C 2014 panel session?

  • Educators seeking to understand Minecraft’s value to learning
  • Programs seeking to adapt Minecraft as part of a program of impact or change.
  • Game designers seeking to build in its wake
  • Anyone wanting to consider issues of fidelity, adaptation, constructionism, popular culture, and impact in gaming.

http://www.stevehargadon.com/2014/04/learning-revolution-conference-schedule.html

http://www.connectsafely.org/teacher-teaching-minecraft-looks-like/

http://www.pearltrees.com/#/N-f=1_10785583&N-fa=3358517&N-p=105030132&N-play=0&N-s=1_10785583&N-u=1_372724

http://gamesandimpact.org/members/bronst/activity/friends/

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