We Learn Better When We Combine Work And Play

“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…

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Microsoft: The Future of Work is Play

In late 2013, Gabe traveled to 12 cities worldwide for GSummit Global, a series of full-day workshops and meetups to bring GSummit closer to gamification fans. As a part of GSummit Global, we also released 10 new webinars and videos by gamification and engagement professionals. We will be releasing them publicly as we keep counting down to GSummit 2014.

Ross Smith is Director of Test at Microsoft and Skype. He has been at Microsoft for over 20 years and believes strongly that “The Future of Work, is Play.” In this fast-paced 18-minute talk, he traces motivation and gameplay from Egyptian pyramids to pre-industrial era to hippy 1970s to the future, and suggests how to manage the new generation analyze workforce and work changes today.

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playing and learning

How Gameplay Transfers Knowledge into Skills

Games are tools for rewiring your brain. When you’re playing a game what you’re essentially doing is building new neurological connections and strengthening them with a process called myelination.

You build new networks that can be used outside the game, then strengthen them through repetition. Now there’s the highly contextualized questions of what skills the game is creating and if its transferable outside that game into the real world. Not all games develop the same skills and not all skills are used in particular fields (these studies are relatively new so expect new insights in the future). Knowledge management has two terms I adopted to understand knowledge transfer from games: adaptation and exaptation, which can acts a lens to understand knowledge transfer from playing games.

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Soccket: The Soccer Ball That Generates Electricity

If you’re able to read this, then you have ample electricity for everyday means. However, there are places in the world that have little-to-no available electricity for simple purposes like lightning their homes at night. Some folks have made a soccer ball that’s able to produce electricity by simply being kicked around in order to provide assistance to those who need it.

Over at Uncharted Play, the creators have invented an energy generating soccer ball called Soccket. The ball produces electricity from the kinetic energy made when kicked around and it only takes 30-minutes of play to power an LED light for 3 hours

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