Our decision to go with mandibles instead of hands would mean Hombre X would be able to eat food at ground-level with his pincer mouth, but not reach higher fruit and the like since he had no hands in which to hold it. You simply plug it into your computer, it syncs with iTunes, and you’re off and running.
This reminds me of when I first bought my iPhone: NO instructions or manuals to be found. Without even a shred of guidance, we were instantly resizing a colorful floating blob to form the body of our creature.Īh, the elegance of good design and usability. There’s virtually no learning curve to the creator. After reading hands-on impressions, I’m even more excited to get my hands on the editor and moreso the game in September We’re finally starting to see some details appear online regarding the creature editor (which is being released mid-June). Like many other gamers, I’ve been following the development of Will Wright’s next epic, Spore, for several years. A great example of a game providing an experience to help illustrate living conditions in another country. I only made it through a couple seasons, trying to get the kids educated, before I ran out of money and had to start working all 5 members of the family in order to put one child to school periodically. The game does a fantastic job of illustrating how HARD this must be for a Haitian family. The game lets you decide your goal for the family (such as happiness, education, or money), then you must allocate the 5 family members to various seasonal activities to achieve your goal. To go along with the quote, Joey pointed me to a game called Ayiti, a Flash game that puts you in the position of managing a Haitian family over 4-years.
Thank you Joey and Gee for putting it so eloquently. I always point out that this is never the case you don’t lecture with powerpoint for 16 weeks and expect students to learn all the content, right? You supplement the lectures with labs, problem assignments, in-class activities, papers, tests, etc. Many faculty have the notion that an educational game should be the complete package students should be able to load it, play it, and then take some form of assessment. This is something I struggle with when explaining the idea of using games for education with faculty. Also, games are not meant to teach you everything you need to know about a subject – rather, to spark interest and fuel the desire to learn more about a subject
Games’ greatest strength is not information delivery it’s more about experiences and how these experiences make you see the world in a new way. Sounds like a lot of good sessions and workshops, but one summary from Jim Gee’s presentation jumped out at me: Sounds like Sid has some great pointers for integrating informal learning into interactive media.įriend and colleague Joey Lee sent me notes on a few sessions from the 5th Games for Change Festival in NYC. As my colleague, Brian, frequently points out, we’re only in a formal school setting for a tiny percent of our lives, it’s all about informal learning. This is difficult in a formal education setting like a university or school, but I can understand where Sid is going with this.
Kids always want to know what will happen next. “Always try to create a sense of anticipation.”.Wendy has a great writeup on her blog, but two of the bullets I found interesting: The title of his talk, Help, I can’t stop learning!, deals with how kids are learning from games. Sid Meier, creator of the Civilization game series, recently keynoted the Innovation in elearning conference.