Trends: gamification. ABC Reading Eggs. MIT Creates The One Video Game You'll Be Thrilled To See Your Kid Get Hooked On. "As game designers," MIT's Scot Osterweil says, "we're convinced that game playing is a lot like science: There is problem-solving, exploration, collaboration, hypothesizing, testing and learning from your failures.” Osterweil, research director of MIT’s Education Arcade, is one of the masterminds behind a new science game made for the Smithsonian Institution. The game is a National Science Foundation-funded experiment in "alternative science education. " Over many years, after conducting many surveys, the NSF made an intriguing conclusion: A good deal of the public's understanding of science derives from outside of the classroom.
NSF developed a program in "Informal Science Education," and Osterweil's team--jointly housed by MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and its Scheller Teacher Education Program--nabbed an NSF grant to work on a game, back in 2009. Two years later, more than 5,000 students are playing the game, Vanished, and leaving about 4,000 posts a day on the sites forums. Five Amazing Games That Add a Third Dimension to Learning. Digital Tools Teaching Strategies Quest Atlantis We received lots of comments on 21 Things That Will Be Obsolete in 2020. To those who expressed doubt that any of those predictions will come to fruition, the writer Shelly Blake-Plock wrote an elegant response. But many more were intrigued by one commenter’s assertion that many of those items on the list are already happening.
So I asked the commenter, educator Gord Holden from Vancouver, B.C., to elaborate on those details. By Gord Holden Four years ago I went from being a school teacher, to a position in distributed learning. “Each day is filled with new achievements and a growing following of engaged ‘co-workers.’” Student feedback was both inadequate and not at all timely. After a year of feeling like a total failure I told the principal that I was dissatisfied with my teaching practice and needed to find a better way to engage the students in their learning. And still, my quest for creating a community of learners was unmet. Related. 10 Environmental Games That Teach Kids About Earth, Ecology & Conservation. With the right eco-education, we can hope they will hit the ground running. A lot of schools and educational institutions are doing their bit by including the environment as part of the curriculum. Words like “˜carbon footprint’ and global warming’ comes to them as easily as the name of any present-day rock star.
That’s cool. But who said that ecological or environmental education needs to be bookish or donnish? Thanks to online games, it can be brought out from textbooks into the fun world. Online environmental games games that teach kids about animals and conservation make the task interactive. Children can immediately learn that each action has a contributing effect. Here are ten games and game websites that teach kids about the environment and the world around them. Planet Science The Planet Science games cupboard is a collection of online interactive games and other fun activities like quizzes.
BBC Climate Change Here’s your chance to see if you can do better in the hot seat. Clim’way.