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