Dan Russell-Pinson | Games, Photography and more… Blot, The Perfect Hand-Drawn Game. Blot ($0.99) by Majestic Software is perhaps the best hand-drawn game. Ever. No, I’m sure there are other contenders out there, but Blot certainly ranks up there. You play as Blot, a blob of ink, as he flies through different pages (levels) in search of coins and adventure. Beautifully rendered backgrounds of different sketches pass by on the pages. Gameplay is similar to Whale Trail, though you don’t lose speed as you fall back on collecting coins, and no evil cloud monster will get you if you scrape the ground. Tapping on the screen (the only control in the game) will give Blot a burst of speed.
Smaller “Boost Buddies” are spread throughout the pages as well. However, one of the more entertaining features of this game is dying. The “Art sSpplies” store offers different power-ups and outfits to spend all of those hard-earned coins. There’s nothing to not like about this game. Trello. Words With Friends - Play the popular word game today! My TED talk: 7 ways games reward the brain | Tom Chatfield. I’ve had the huge pleasure of giving a talk at TED Global in Oxford, about the lessons games can teach us about engagement and about learning itself. The full video is now online on the TED website; below is a brief summary of a few central points.
We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be satisfied by the world in particular ways; and to be intensely satisfied as a species by learning and problem-solving. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the virtual arenas that games create is that we are now able to reverse-engineer that, and to produce environments that exist expressly to tick our evolutionary boxes and to engage us. When it comes to games themselves, the “fun first” principle is an absolute: before anything and everything else, a game must be fun. So I’ve come up with seven larger ideas for motivating and engaging people on the basis of observing many games’ stunning power as engines of human engagement: 1. 4. 5. 6. 7. 'Hakitzu' Teaches Kids to Code With Robot Warriors. Complete with battling robots, challenging arenas and a little bit of friendly competition, Kuato Studio's new game seeks to both entertain and educate as it teaches children how to code.
Hakitzu: Code of the Warrior, a strategy game, prompts players to type basic JavaScript to control characters. The free iPad app pits two robots against each other in a battle arena, where each user takes turns coding increasingly complex instructions to move and use weapons. No previous knowledge of programming is necessary and the in-game keyboard is customized with commonly used keys. Kuato Studios takes an immersive gamification approach to pique players' interest in coding. At the end of the game, players will have learned variables, functions, core construction of code, and syntax for JavaScript, founder and CEO Frank Meehan explained.
To create Hakitzu, Kuato conducted research at schools in the U.S. and United Kingdom. What do you think of Hakitzu? Image courtesy of Kuato. It Takes A Guild: Mobile Education. Scott Meunier's social stories. Inevitable Instructors......each Saturday. Fun, Flow, and Fiero: Reflections on Week 1 of the Games Based Learning MOOC | Remixing College English.
As mentioned in my last post, I am planning to gamify next Fall’s first-semester FYC course, using Interactive Fiction (IF) and the multiplayer classroom model. The decision to do so came completely independently of a new MOOC that started this past week that focuses on Games Based Learning (GBL). I had not intended to take this MOOC, since I had already signed up for another MOOC that would overlap with it. However, when I saw that the GBL MOOC would be covering IF, I decided to give it a try. The great thing about MOOCs is that they are voluntary and, therefore, you can dip in and out of them as you wish. Case in point: the three concepts we covered during the first week are fun, flow, and fiero. Fun Learning doesn’t have to be fun. Hard fun doesn’t always feel like fun, though sometimes it can. Flow Flow is, according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the secret to happiness.
If you’re an educator, then this game-designer language probably sounds very familiar. Fiero Guess what? Like this: Flow - How do you encourage it? I think student autonomy is a big contributor to flow. If students are truly interested in what they are doing, they're more likely to experience flow. Also, I think that if they're having fun, even if they don't necessarily like or have an intrinsic motivation for the topic being addressed, they may experience serendipitous flow. In truth, though, I think all flow is serendipitous. There are so many factors that have to be present all at the same/right moment. For example, the other day in my FYC class, the students were role playing in Second Life. The students have adopted a specific role for the semester (criminal investigator, psychologist, journalist, etc.). Hanging out with the psychologists in SL by tasasser, on Flickr The other day, the groups were discussing the play Trifles, which involves a woman in a small rural community who has apparently murdered her husband, who may have been abusing her (it's based on a real case from the early 20th century).
Talking about the TED Talk. #7548012 Leedale wrote: There's a lot of competition for students' attention, so getting that idea of "epic meaning" across can be a challenge. "...the only problem is that is that they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That's the problem that I'm trying to solve. " How do we convey hope? How do we make something as mundane as the real world give someone an epic win? I think the answer is bigger than gamification, game elements, and other limited terms.
I think it'll span all the way from event management to graphic design to marketing to...? I think our first step in this Herculean task is to encourage students to find their real world passion. If you think about it, people who are passionate about something are the ones who are making a difference in the world, perhaps not on a global level, but on some level.
Image. Week 1 Awards.