Games
What Can 135 Million Video Gamers Add to Our Collective IQ?
Flickr:Blakespot By Jennie Rose An estimated 135 million people play video games, spending three billion hours a week glued to a screen. But that’s not necessarily bad news. In fact, playing video games may be part of an evolutionary leap forward, according to Howard Rheingold, educator and author of the book Net Smart: How to [...]
How Games Are Being Used for Learning
The Infinite Thinking Machine is back after a summer hiatus. This episode focusing on gamification features a great rundown of learning games and programs, including Minecraft, Gamestar Mechanic, NYC Haunts, and Gamedesk, a game company that recently opened a game-based learning school within a school in Los Angeles.
Where Do Educational Games Come From?
Flickr:Flickingrbrad Increasingly, digital games are cropping up everywhere in education. And that’s stimulated a flurry of activity leading to the expectation that no longer are learning games only likely to come from traditional education companies, but a wide variety of sources. The expectation-setting stats and statements, at least, are straightforward. Both the New Media Consortium’s [...]
GameDesk Opens New Game-Based School
GameDesk By Andrew Miller GameDesk, an organization that’s developing a variety of game-based learning initiatives, is venturing into new terrain with the opening of a new school and the development of new digital tools, with millions of dollars in funding from both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AT&T. The PlayMaker School, funded by [...]
What’s the Difference Between Games and Gamification?
Perhaps the best way to think about games in education is not to automatically call everything that looks like fun a “learning game.” Lumping all digital game approaches together makes no more sense than a toddler’s inclination to call every four-legged animal a “doggie.” Game interest is definitely on the upswing in K-12 and higher [...]
What Makes Educational Games Work?
As the gaming in education continues to grow, one of the foremost experts in the field, Constance Steinkuehler, makes the case for why it’s important to pay attention to what works in gaming and how it could be applied to learning. At the recent Aspen Ideas Festival, Steinkuehler, who’s now a Senior Policy Analyst at [...]
Six Great Online Games for Summer Learning
By Almetria Vaba Summer can be a great opportunity to leverage a child’s interest in specific subjects, like science or history, with their fascination for digital games. PBS LearningMedia, launched a year ago, has a robust collection of free interactive games to experiment, manipulate, and investigate. Amusement Park Physics How do physics laws affect amusement [...]
Video Game Portal Enters the Classroom
Valve By Andrew Miller Video game company Valve is going deep into the education world with a new initiative using Steam, their free online game platform where users can download games and communicate and play with other players. The initiative is called Steam for Schools, and a free educational version is now available to teachers [...]
How to Use Video Game Tactics in the Classroom
Science teacher Paul Anderson says video games teach kids that failure is okay — that it’s part of the learning process. “Trying something, failing, trying something again, that’s something we aspire to see in kids,” he says. So he created a class around the premise of a video game — without a video game. Anderson [...]
Teachers Transform Commercial Video Game for Class Use
Seeing its massive potential as a learning tool, 2 teachers — one in Finland, one in the U.S. — took it upon themselves to create a version for educators.
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