Tangram Puzzle game added to the Flex labs gallery, under Games. Source provided under the download link.

After announcing reduced pricing for Flex Builder 3 ($299 rather than $499), Adobe is now offering Adobe Flex Builder 2 at no cost to students and faculty at educational institutions worldwide, starting early November.Adobe advances Web 2.0 in education, Press release @ Reuters UK

Great news. I was told today that my visa application for residency in NZ has been approved. I can start applying for jobs there.We used the services of overseas emigration to make sure all admin was managed properly. Given that my situation was a no brainer (highly skilled, in a relationship with a kiwi for 5 years, married for 2 years etc.), chances were high that the visa would be accepted anyway. But to fail to fill a form properly means 3-6 months of delay. OE helped us get through on the first go, without any bump on the road. Very professional and great service.

Very nice interactive interface that let you explore a report prepared for KnowledgeWorks Foundation.Check out the introductory page or go directly to the interactive map. A PDF version is also available from the introductory page.The map lists 3 key elements:Trend: represents major shifts, new phenomena and concepts, and driving forces that will shape the future context of education. Some trends listed are personalized learning plans, participatory pedagogy, serious games, do-it yourself kits, etc.Hotspot: Hotposts are trends that are thought to have a broad impact on education and make good starting points for exploring the map. Examples are: explosion of learning agents, media-rich pervasive learning, deep personalization, VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) communities.Dilemna: Problems that can’t be solved and won’t go away. They require new strategies that go beyond either-or thinking. An example of dilemna listed on the map is achieving standards and personalization.The map plots these different trends according to two dimensions.

• The horizontal axis groups the impact areas: Family & Community, Markets, Institutions, Educators & Learning, Tools & Practices.
• The vertical axis groups the drivers: the end of cyberspace (from physical vs digital to seamlessly physical and digital), urban wilderness (from predominantly rural to predominantly urban spaces), sick herd (from improving quality of life to increasing signs of distress), strong opinions (from a global media culture to a splintered fundamentalism), smart networking (from informed citizens to engaged networkers), assorted economics (from economies of scale to economies of groups).

ChipWits was a software originally created in the mid 1980’s by Doug Sharp. I didn’t have the pleasure to play with it at the time as it was Mac only and I didn’t have a Mac. I heard of it only a few years ago on a mailing list. It had evidently left a lasting impression on persons who had tried it. Some commented this was the best game software they had ever played with.Incidently, I learned that a new version was in preparation and I signed up for beta testing. Unfortunately, the game was then windows only and I am a mac user. I only had a chance to check it out on a PC borrowed for a short period of time. It left with a great impression. This is really a great piece of educational software.The concept is simple. You have a little robot in the room. You have to pilot the robot so to collect various items. To pilot the robot, you have to choose between instructions currently available to you and drag and drop them to define a sequence of events. Correct, you got it. What you do is nothing but learn to program. And you do so in the best way possible. You are introduced to basic concepts first. You get to manipulate the more complex concepts only when you have gained sufficient experience. You get to learn without even noticing. It looks like a game. Grabs your attention like a game. Has you highly motivated about finishing each level.It’s really some of the best resources I have ever come across for teaching to program to you kids.Check it out: chipwits II (mac, windows and soon linux).

Two months or so into learning Flex. I start to have all basics covered. Add media, adding animations, adding sound, using variables defined in the html document that contains the loader, and much more.Check out the Flex GalleryPerhaps of particular interest, an early version of a Tile-Based Game Engine. Fully working. There is of course room for improvement.

Very nice blog post by Phil Bradley.Web 2.0 questions I’m most often asked

• How can I trust these resources to keep going?
• These tools are not authoritative
• I don’t have time to learn all these things!
• Too much information!
• How do these things make money?
• I don’t know which ones to use!
• I’m not allowed to do this stuff
• How can I use this resource if it’s only in Beta?
• My university/place of work/organization wouldn’t want to be associated with some of these tools.

Introduced by AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins, this panel discussion considers the new opportunities related to the social networking space. Panelists include moderator Charlene Li, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research; Travis Katz, SVP, MySpace International; Dustin Moskovitz, Co-Founder, Facebook; Rich Rosenblatt, CEO, Demand Media; Gina Bianchini, CEO, Ning; Karl Jacob, CEO, Wallop.

Podcast from the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit (57min)

I attended a seminar a few months back on the theme of serious gaming.Serious Game @ wikipedia.fr — this article is in French only.Presenters were Olivier Rampnoux, Julien Alvarez, Jean-Pierre Jessel. All members of the European Center of children products.Very nice talk. Covered

1. Why using video games
2. Classification
3. What kind of objectives
4. Girl Gaming

Some information that came across.1) Why be interested in games?- Commercial domain. Market study show that nowadays kids spend more time in front of a console or computer connected to the web than in front of a television. Apparently they spend 3 hours in front of a screen. That’s good news for advertising as this means that they have a chance to target a large public at a lower price (TV advertising is really pricey) and with less resistance (TV advertising is not that successful). The concept to check out there is the one of advergaming Advergaming @ wikipedia, Advergaming Catches On- Education domain. Studies show that students need more interactivity. The good old system whereby they sit and listen to a lecturer doesn’t work well with them anymore. They get bored and they don’t take much information in. Then the 1 hour format doesn’t work well either as their attention span tends to be shorter. In contrast, studies show that positive emotions, like the ones you get when playing help with more efficient memory encoding. Hence the notion of Education Arcade, introduced by the MIT.2,3) Classification. They have done some *very* nice work there. They created a database to store information about up to 1000 games. They then analysed them to try to understand the different dimensions that characterise a game. What they mentioned during the talk was their analysis of objectives and goals within the game. They came up with 10 major rules, where rules are defined by what you have to do to be allowed to move to the next level. These rules are Answer | Manage | Have luck | shoot | create | block (maintain) | destroy (collect) | position | avoid | move | time | score. Then using these low level rules, they define bigger bricks of metarules. A game that would mix move and avoid as objectives would make up a DRIVER game. A game that would mix shoot and destroy would make a KILLER game, one that would mix manage and create would make a GOD game. Of course, games can count more than one brick. If you take the good old space invader, then you have both the driver and killer components included.4) Girl Gaming. The big problem, you see is that games then to be written by boys and be most successful with boys. All good when you try to sell to a leisure market. Problem is when you try to do advergaming, failing to engage 50% of your customers is not so good. Then in education, having a product that works only with 50% of the class is not great.There was a bit of discussion on this topic. Apparently, girls and boys don’t use a game in the same way. I go for cliche description now. Girls tend to do as told and carefully, and with a lot of attention, engage in the game. They read every single box of text that appears and they have at heart to do well. They play once. They get a quite high score. Boys just want to have fun. They rush through. Then they discover that they have a score lower than their neighbour, so they get back to the game and try to increase their score.Girls seem to prefer to play games where they have to think about games. They want to be involved with the game. They also expect to get something out of the game, to be taught something, to acquire some knowledge. They expect content. Boys are more after some direct and simple stimulation. That’s more about having fun and then get a score that let you know how well you did.Another reason of the lack of success of traditional games with girls is the complex devices and set of key combinations being used. Games where controls are a lot simpler (like the last wii console) and where dexterity is not that important seem to have a better success with girls. Some also say to prefer black and white graphics over these new 3D all fancy graphics.

I gave a try to Poser today, toke me about an hour to create these 3 versions of a character.Don’t be impressed, that’s one of the characters provided with the app. To get there what you do is choose a figure from a menu, choose some haircut from a menu, choose some face expression in a menu, then choose some pose in a menu. Poser is a heft price tag, not really affordable for the hobbyist.Other products exist in a cheaper range. Take Sketchup, for instance. 3D scenes with the possibility to drop in 3D static characters. 100% free for education!If you don’t have an artisic drive, no worries. You can find a repository of free 3D content at the 3D warehouse. Alternatively, you can find professional 2D and 3D content at websites like content paradise or turbosquid.There is a brand new industry that has emerged that tries to give hobbyists like me the tools and assets to produce impressive content without me having to follow a 3 year training in design. So they claim, at least. For my part, I found most useful to read books that explains basic principles of design and composition.What could be interesting is if services where created like rent a coder that would let you develop learning content on the cheap. Rent a graphic designer to produce four to ten 3D avatar that you are then free to re-arrange the way you like, in infinite number of poses. Rent a learning designer to give you feedback on the (educational) quality of the learning content you have designed. Rent a creative writer to create a story to offer the common elements of a set of lessons. I dunno. I am curious to see if that kind of services, targeted to an education market will appear and how long it will take.

Next page »

Learning Activities

Learning, Edutainment, serious games.

Categories All Uncategorized courseware open flex learning object New Zealand gaming girls in computing semantic web seminar notes assets social networking podcast reports and trends web 2.0 education

Archives October 2008 May 2008 April 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007

Meta Login Valid XHTML XFN WordPress

Feeds Posts Comments

Banner designed by widged.com | XHTML | CSS | RSS | Wordpress | Design by Infektia.net