BigGames The last few years have seen the blossoming of real world computer games that allow players to learn about important global issues. Here are a bunch of them. (If you know of others, please let us know so we can post them.) Real Lives is a unique, interactive life sim that enables you to live one of billions of lives in any country in the world. FoodForce teaches about hunger and the global food situation by putting you in charge of an emergency food mission. NationStates is a nation simulation game. Darfur is Dying is a narrarive based simulation where the player, from the perspective of a displaaced Darfurian, negotiates forces that threaten the survival of his or her refugee camp. A Force More Powerful is a game of nonviolent strategy that allows the user to wage nonviolent struggles for freedom and rights against dictators, occupiers, authoritarians, and oppressive rule.
10 Speaking English Activities using TED.com Many English Language teachers, when deciding to work with a video clip in their classrooms, make a false assumption that for an activity to be considered as really teaching, then prior to showing it, they'd better sit down for a few hours, prepare an extensive worksheet filled with vocabulary and grammar questions and what-not...in order to turn it into a good pedagogical exercise, you know to ensure it's really not just glorified babysitting. ;-) Personally, I don't agree and I really don't think that extensive worksheets provide a particularly authentic experience - such a thing mainly just erodes the power of the message within the video, takes away the inherent pleasure in learning from TED speakers. Here are a few simple activities you can do with the video clip you're about to show/ are showing/ have shown to your students without designing a full worksheet : 1. Ask them what they think the speaker will be discussing and why they think this. Examples: 2. 3. Examples: 5a. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Game mechanics for causes – Catalysts for Change – Evolution of Philanthropy Nothing is more captivating than a well-thought out game. That’s why more and more initiatives are building games (or using game mechanics) to create positive social change. Here’s a new one that launched today – it’s called Catalysts for Change, and it gives players a game-like competition for sharing and responding to ideas about solving the world’s social problems. It’s a bit like Quora meets Twitter meets Trivial Pursuit. One you sign up, you’re asked to submit “cards”, which are basically suggestions or responses to specific issues. The challenge with any game-like initiative is that if the game itself isn’t fun and engaging, then it’s a missed opportunity to really connect with people. Like this: Like Loading...
The Playpump: How a Simple Gamification Concept can Save the (third) World New to Gamification? Check out my post What is Gamification & my Gamification Framework: Octalysis Gamification visits the Third World Most of the time, we think of Gamification as a technique to get consumers to like our products more, to be more productive in life, and improve our workplace, but Gamification can sometimes be used to save an entire nation. While we enjoy our Twitter, iPhones, Starbucks, and Reality Shows, many third world country nations are literally thirsty for clean water. Some families need to travel for 2 hours one way just to get a bucket of clean water for their families. I’ve spent 6 years of my childhood in South Africa, and even though most of the nation has fine standards of living, there are some places that show how fragile the human life really is. We’re not talking about failing a test, losing your job or being dumped – stuff that could make us depressed for weeks – we’re talking about watching your family members die or dying yourself in a constant basis.
Can Open Government Be Gamed? If information is power, the first step to gaining power is to get the right data. The Obama administration is a big proponent of opening up government data and making it digitally available. Today at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, the government’s new chief information officer Vivek Kundra announced USAspending.gov, a new site which launched today that tracks government spending with charts and lists ranking the largest government contractors (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, etc.) and assistance recipients (Department of Healthcare Services, New York State Dept. of Health, Texas Health & Human Services Commission, etc.). While Kundra agrees in principle that all public government data should be online, he also cautions that the reality is government data sits in more than 10,000 different systems, many of them written in COBOL or are still locked in dusty paper archives. Digital tools are bringing participation back to democracy, or at least that is the idea.
Introducing a Game-Based Curriculum in Higher Ed Continuing from last week’s post about “The Gamification of Education”, this week we bring you a guest post from Justin Marquis, who examines the why’s and how’s of incorporating game based learning elements into the higher education curriculum. The gamification movement is in full-effect with its fair share of proponents and opponents. Those in favor of the idea most often cite student motivation and the ability of games to simulate real world circumstances so that learners can safely explore these environments without endangering themselves or others. Those on the other side of the argument think gamification is just a fad and that there is no real transfer of what is learned in games to the real world. There is enough research on both sides to support either point of view, but perhaps those most opposed to the incorporation of games into their curriculum just don’t know where to begin? Why Games in Higher Ed? About Kelly Walsh Print This Post
The Gamification of Education and Cognitive, Social, and Emotional Learning Benefits Guest post by Jane Wolff. The current trend towards the increased use of games and game mechanics in instructional situations could probably have been foreseen quite some time ago. Stretching right back to the primitive gaming technology of the ZX Spectrum in the early 80’s, kids were hooked. As a wider variety and higher quality of educational games have been produced, it is really no surprise that educationists have gravitated towards further use of them as tools in the learning environment. Is this necessarily a positive development, however? A recent article on the subject makes for interesting reading. In 2011, Joey J. ‘Cognitive’ benefits include the development of problem-solving skills. Gamification can, according to Lee, be a powerful tool in addressing the child’s ‘emotional’ needs. The ‘social’ benefits of gamification may not be immediately apparent, since gaming has a rather unfair image of being an antisocial activity as games are often played alone. About Kelly Walsh
Educating Players: Are Games the Future of Education? CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Smart phones, tablets and video game systems are often seen as distractions to school children in developed countries, which tend to adhere to a strict teacher-student educational model. At Technology Review‘s Emerging Technologies (EmTech) conference here on October 25, a panel of technologists and educators posited that it’s time to embrace students’ use of such technologies and rethink learning in both developed and developing countries. “The issue isn’t education or schools—it’s learning,” panelist Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman emeritus of M.I.T.’s Media Lab and the chairman of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) foundation, said. Not a new argument, but Negroponte’s approach to resolving it has been novel. To test this, OLPC in April delivered boxes containing more than a dozen tablet computers loaded with books, games and other apps—in English—to an isolated village in the Ethiopian highlands. Credit: paz.ca/Flickr
Story-Based Games as Transformational Media Story-Based Games as Transformational Media In John Stewart’s posting, “Flow Engineering using computer games,” he begins to “sketch some ways in which computer game frameworks can be used to promote the positive development of humanity, both as individuals and collectively.” The general subject of transformative media is directly relevant to another conference venue, Social Approaches to Consciousness, and together they become a mandate for meaningful media. The term media covers a lot of ground, and it is by virtue of an infinite array of mediation that humans learn about their environment, themselves, their cultural values, and the meaning underlying the patterns of their lives. A mythic marker of such experiences is the loss of time sense that can be associated with many “profound” human experiences, and the loss of time sense is a significant aspect of what is experienced as “immersion” in a video game (or transcendental meditation). Why story-based games?
Synthesis: How Games Could Save the World Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, Jane McGonigal, Penguin Press, 2011 Game Developers Conference,www.gdconf.com Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab,www.povertyactionlab.org Innovations for Poverty Action,www.poverty-action.org I have a confession: I am a games geek. I am not alone. Like any workers whose industry has been disrupted, game designers want to know what to do. Social games, Koster notes, are excellent at harnessing gift giving (core mechanic #20). Win the Planet – games that change the world! Urgent Evoke - A crash course in changing the world. Can a mobile game help find the cure for cancer? Amazon, Google and Facebook hope so We already know that data is integral to finding the cure for cancer, but some of that data needs the attention of human rather than machine eyes to be properly interpreted. To that end, the charity Cancer Research UK has teamed up with Amazon, Facebook and Google to create a mobile game for analysing genetic mutations. The aim of the game is simply to harness more eyes – cancer researchers already trawl through genetic data to try to pick up on subtle irregularities, but the task would be a lot easier if more people were involved. Cancer Research UK is holding a hackathon called GameJam this weekend, at which 40 coders – including Facebook engineers — gamers, graphic designers and “other specialists” will hopefully come up with a suitable format — the goal is a game that can be played for just 5 minutes at a time. “We’re making great progress in understanding the genetic reasons cancer develops. The game will launch this summer.