Gamification
Gamification tree for research into a gamified class about social networking at the University of Washington. Jan 23
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and Harvard announce edX
Harvard University and MIT today announced edX , a transformational new partnership in online education. Through edX, the two institutions will collaborate to enhance campus-based teaching and learning and build a global community of online learners. EdX will build on both universities’ experience in offering online instructional content. The technological platform recently established by MITx , which will serve as the foundation for the new learning system, was designed to offer online versions of MIT courses featuring video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, student-ranked questions and answers, online laboratories and student-paced learning. Certificates of mastery will be available for those who are motivated and able to demonstrate their knowledge of the course material.
At a keynote event at South by Southwest Friday afternoon, ex-video game executive and Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon shared lessons from his gaming life with SXSW attendees. After Gordon led off with a poem that he wrote right before the event, it became apparent that his passion for gaming has also been a factor in his business success. His words about how he factors the gaming culture into areas of management and organizational learning got me to thinking that more IT organizations should start factoring in gamification , that is, the application of gaming principles to activities outside of gaming, whether you're applying those principles to customers or to employees of the organization. He went so far as to say, "Every Fortune 500 company should have a gamer on the board." In fact, any company that doesn't figure out gamification is at risk, Gordon said. Why?
SXSW: What Gaming Should Teach IT Leaders - Global-cio - Executive insights/interviews - Informationweek
CuppaDev - Syncing Youtube with Websockets
A while ago i came across SynchTube , a rather neat service which allows you to synchronise the playback of a Youtube videos (as well as other services). This creates a rather interesting viewing experience: one can discover and collaboratively critique videos they otherwise would never have seen before. After playing around with Synchtube, i was curious as to how it worked.
Slot machine in Javascript
Lets start building the slot machine. Demo here First of all we need a sprite for our slot machine. This sprite is basically a reel which in motion simulates a slot. Its preferable to have blurred copy of this reel too, to show the effect of motion.
Gaming for Your Grades: The Gamification of Education at Penn State — Teaching and Learning with Technology
With this statement in mind, Penn State has responded to the innovation of gaming with the Educational Gaming Commons (EGC) and various gamification aspects incorporated into University syllabi. "Most games are built from a set of core mechanics- points, systems, rewards, etc. Gamification is the idea of extracting those concepts and using them in non-game situations to make an experience more compelling,” said Chris Stubbs, a designer and programmer for the EGC. “It sounds like a mouthful, but most people are already familiar with the concept, even if they don’t know it.
If the success of sites like Gowalla , Foursquare, and other game-like forms of social media tells us much, it’s that people will do *anything* for a virtual badge. The attempt to capitalize on this behavior has been called gamification , since it borrows some of the reward structures of game mechanics and applies them to everyday tasks. While the premise behind it has been around for a while, as Wikipedia notes, it has started to get more attention from venture capitalists, developers, and researchers in 2010. While not everyone may be ready to assent to Eric Schmidt’s thesis that “Everything in the future online is going to look like a multiplayer game ,” it’s hard to deny that structuring learning experiences around frustration/reward dynamics can lead to engaged learners.
Gamifying Homework - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Gabe Zichermann is the chair of the upcoming Gamification Summit NYC (9/15-16, 2011), where industry leaders will gather to share knowledge and insight. Zichermann is also an author, highly rated public speaker and entrepreneur whose book, “ Gamification by Design ” (O’Reilly, 2011) is the first to look at the technical and architectural considerations for designing engagement using game concepts. Badges are among the most visible elements of gamification, the use of game-thinking and game mechanics to engage media audiences. A badge is one of many tools in an engagement design arsenal that also includes point systems, leaderboards, challenges, rewards, team play and achievement, among others. However, social media badges are often maligned as boring or weak.
HOW TO: Properly Use Badges to Engage Customers
Badge Research
Video games , we have been led to believe, are about wasting time. It is a misunderstanding that players and game makers have railed against for 40 years. While movies and television are endlessly analysed and debated in the mainstream media, games are characterised as troubling, irresponsible or banal, the fatuous byproducts of the digital revolution. But a growing number of theorists and designers disagree. This is, after all, an entertainment medium that worldwide makes $50bn a year, a medium in which an estimated one third of UK adults indulge. An emerging school of thought, drawing on cognitive science, psychology and sociology, suggests that our growing love of video games may actually have important things to tell us about our intrinsic desires and motivations.
The seduction secrets of video game designers | Technology | The Observer
The Psychology of Video Games
Imagine that some wealthy lunatic comes to you with an offer to choose between the following gambles in order to win five bucks: Option 1: A stock is selected at random from the Wall Street Journal. You guess whether it will go up or down tomorrow. If you’re right, you win $5. Option 2: A stock is selected at random from the Wall Street Journal. You guess whether it went up or down yesterday.
Phat Loot and Neurotransmitters in World of Warcraft « The Psychology of Video Games
How are loot-based games like World of Warcraft, Torchlight, and Borderlands related to slot machines, chemical bliss, and evolution? Read on for the answer. During my early days with World of Warcraft (WoW) I remember tromping through Westfall killing crowds of Defias bandits when I was shocked by a loot drop: a rare pair of “blue” gloves that perfectly fit my class’s needs at the time. For those of you who don’t know, killing enemies in WoW gives you a random chance at one or more pieces armor, weapons, or other items called “loot” in WoW parlance. These are stratified according their text’s color: gray, white, green, blue, purple, and orange in order of increasing quality. For a level 20-something character to find a blue item on a random enemy was actually very rare, and I experienced a huge rush from it.The new Professional Education interface offers a much larger video window as well as the ability for users to take their own notes online. The notes function offers pre-populated index points created by the course subject matter expert as well as the ability for individual users to take their own notes (which are saved to his/her profile and accessible during future viewings). PDF versions of the lecture slides are available within the interface and viewers can navigate among session videos directly from the interface. If using the Windows Media Player (WMP) based interface, variable speed playback controls are available.
Technical Support | Stanford Center for Professional Development
Smart Gamification: Seven Core Concepts for Creating Compelling Experiences | Amy Jo KIM | Casual Connect
Games are infiltrating every aspect of daily life – and everyone’s now a gamer, in one form or another. Early-on “gamification” involved adding simple game mechanics like points, badges and leaderboards to websites and apps. But that’s not what makes games truly compelling. Good games take players on a journey, giving them something to learn, master and share. Gamification 2.0 is about creating game-like digital services that shape real-world behavior and deliver deep value to players, — using a blend of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.How to 'Gamify' Your Class Website - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education
[ This is a guest post by Anastasia Salter , Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Baltimore in the school of Information Arts and Technologies . Her academic work focuses on storytelling in new media; she also writes the Future Fragments column for CinCity. Follow her on Twitter at MsAnastasia .--@jbj ]The Escapist : Will Grind for Grades
Let's take a moment and remove ourselves from the debate about mainstream videogames and their future or lack thereof. Just for a small while, put aside your position on Dragon Age II's limited scope or your rage about those egregious glitches that contaminate the world of Skyrim, and have a look at the sterling output of a different gaming world in 2011: educational videogames. The real question, however, is not whether children want arcades in their classrooms. It's whether these programs improve learning. I'm not referring to the Windows 95-era mainstays like Carmen Sandiego or Reader Rabbit, either.While the bear’s away, the cats can come out and play? Well, it’s in a little different vein than the usual game design articles here, but I felt the topic was pertinent enough to entertainment game design to post here. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m particularly interested in the convergence of video gaming and video game culture with formal Education and educational psychology.
Can a College Class be a Game? ~ Of Teeth and Claws
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