At this year’s Games for Change, Jesse Schell of Schell Games showed off his company’s newest idea for making chemistry more approachable for middle and high school students — Happy Atoms, a mixed reality, lego-like experience that asks people to explore atom formation through play. G.Co was fortunate enough to speak with Jesse last week…
Highlights From This Year’s Games For Change Last week, Games For Change had their 13th annual festival at the New School’s Parsons School of Design. New to the festival this year were three featured tracks participants could focus on: the Games for Learning Summit; health and neuroscience; and civics and social change. Gamification.Co was lucky enough to attend,…
McDonald’s will use a new meal prep training system for its staff this fall McDonald’s customers in the United Kingdom will soon notice subtle changes in how their meals are prepared. To carry out these seemingly small changes, corporate leaders are making some big changes in how they train their managers. In order to bring all…
“The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force…” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Time For Work And Time For Play Anthropologists define “play” as activities involving games, stories or art. Children love these activities because they’re fun, but there is also a serious evolutionary purpose behind them: implicit learning. Through…
The power of STEM and Intrinsic Gamification Successful people in every domain seem to have an intrinsic love for their profession. This love creates a lifelong engagement in their careers, constantly learning and expanding their skills and expertise. As game designer Raph Koster said about fun, “Fun is another word for learning.” Yet can we…
A company called GlassLab, a project of the Institute of Play, has teamed with NASA to create a game based learning system that teaches students argumentation, logic, and reason. The game is called Mars Generation One: Argubot Academy and is available for tablets running Android and iOS.
Education Games Research had an account of a Canadian teacher, Dr. Shawn Graham, who employed a unique approach in using games in education. The teacher set up a scenario in the popular simulation game Civilization IV to allow students to become one of the factions in Ancient Rome’s “Year of the Four Emperors” that took place in 69 A.D. after the assassination of Nero. During that year, four successive Roman generals, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian in rapid succession marched on Rome with their legions and seized power.
Eric’s High School Experience is an online K-12 education resource that offers interactive learning tools for those attempting the SAT, seeking ways to improve their high school performance or just keeping up with a lifelong learning goal.
It is a response to the College Board’s call to action after the 2013 SAT report on College & Career readiness revealed that only 43% of students that took the SAT were qualified as college-ready, and that this number had remained virtually unchanged for five years.
If you’ve ever attempted to learn a second language, you might have found yourself overwhelmed by this apparently daunting task, or even worse, got yourself disengaged because of the dryness of traditional textbooks and lecture formats they are conveyed in.
Don’t give up just yet! There are a couple of game-like methods out there for you to diverge from the traditional learning setting. This year during GDC week, Influent was released. Aimed to be a “Language Game Redefined”, the game enables players to have a self-directed learning experience, immersing them in a 3D house, fully furnished with a rich amount of everyday objects that can be interacted with in the chosen language.
Memrise.com is emerging as one of the best language-learning online web tools. Although Memrise could hypothetically be used for any type of memorization, it specializes in language learning and in particular, vocabulary retention. In order to engage users, Memrise uses gamification techniques that keeps users coming back to learn more.
There has been a lot of buzz going on as more schools and universities adopt methods of game based learning. It’s gaining so much ground that studies are emerging to test if game based learning is truly effective. From what the studies have learned thus far , the answer is a resounding “Yes, it is.”
In late 2002, the iVISiCE (interactive Visualization in Civil Engineering) project was founded to assist students of Civil Engineering in their studies. The project was to test if learning by ways of animations and visualizations was more effective than traditional textbook methods.
We often like to say that sometimes good design and creativity can trump technology, like in the case of Amy Baskin’s grammar olympics or David Hunter’s zombified geography curriculum. Most people want to use gamification solutions with fancy apps and SaaS solutions but what if you simply don’t have the resources? Monica Cornetti is a gamification expert specializing in using some creative designs for training purposes and we invited her to speak on our weekly Gamification Revolution webshow.
She walks us through her methods for low to no tech gamified training and shares her knowledge on:
And much more! Watch her full interview with Gabe Zichermann below and be sure to watch Victor Manrique join on our gamification show this Thursday at 1PM ET:
At Cisco, we use gamification across a number of key programs. One program where we have extensively incorporated gamification techniques is our Social Media Training Program.
During the past two years, the Global Social Media Team at Cisco has invested in our Social Media Training Program. This program offers a unique opportunity for employees and contractors at Cisco to build their social media skillset. And the opportunity to leverage the skills they learn is manifold.
Conspiracy Code Teaches American History with Virtual Spies When considering the difference between gamified learning and game-based learning, Conspiracy Code is a perfect example of a game-based learning game. Conspiracy Code is a 3rd person action/puzzler game that teaches a high school American History curriculum. Students play the game as two teenagers named Eddie and Libby living…
When it comes to gamification, no community can match the level of excitement, engagement, and dedication to the concept as much as our education readers do.
To wrap up our first week of the best gamification stories of 2013, we’d like to present 5 stories ranging from the emergence of World of Warcraft, Minecraft, and zombies in schools to increased US government spending on educational game initiatives. It’s a good (read: fun) time to be an educator for 2014.
