Announce on GamesOnDeck ”
In a recent presentation with Newsweek’s Level Up, mobile gaming solution developer Vollee demonstrated its handset client by streaming Second Life with an adapted layout to a mobile phone. “
Link to a video demo
Homo sapiens continuus. The emergence of a new species of learners
Date: Wednesday April 9, 2008Posted in: education, girls in computing, gaming
Various interesting articles presenting a profile of the new generation of learners
Emily - The Connected Ape by Robert Hart
A 7 pages pdf presenting data of internet presence and community participation for a typical teen.
Of interest: “Emily might be “slow” at school, but she’s like a hurricane online. Her mobile connected lifestyle has changed her educational and social experience.”
Emily: the connected human
A lead on article on the same subject
Most kids want educational video games in school, survey shows. … So?
An article introducing survey results on kids use of video games and their expectations to be given video-games for learning.Of interest : “Only 3% of elementary school students say they do not play video games of any kind.”
Tangram Puzzle game added to the Flex labs gallery, under Games. Source provided under the download link.
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).
Seminar on Serious Gaming
Date: Monday October 8, 2007Posted in: seminar notes, girls in computing, gaming
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
- Why using video games
- Classification
- What kind of objectives
- 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.
