Million-Dollar NSF Grant to Spark Young Gamers’ Interest in Science

The blog title says it all. Here is the article.  Its just proof that grants can be had.

STEM game design Competion

I wish I had time to work on something for this competition to design STEM educational game.

Hell I wish I had time to do more than one post every other month on this blog.

Sébastien

gamers crack protein folding puzzle

Interesting, and not entirely irrelevant, news story:

• http://goo.gl/ktdDd

Virus

From University of Wisconsin's "Wisconsin Institute for Discovery" is an article about their approach towards game design for teaching science and specifically talks about their Virus game for iPad. I like their attitude towards games  for education. I wish I had an iPad so I could try it out.

PS: Hopefully someday soon I will have time to generate actual content in this blog instead of just posting cool links

Code Hero: a programing learning game

This game looks pretty cool. Your gun fires computer code that changes behavior of its target.  You can load you gun with different kinds of code. (eg:  Move(0,0,400) or AddForce(100,0,0). ) that you either write your self or copy from other objects.

NASA Education MMO game getting funding

I was about to write a response to Ian's last post when I found this post about a NASA Education Game.

Here's the homepage for the game and a NASA post about it.

Its very similar to what we've been considering.

Sébastien

playing the whole game

My current bedtime reading is "Making Learning Whole", by David Perkins (http://goo.gl/w8kj1). He advocates teaching students to "play the whole game" right from the outset, or at least a respectably complete junior version of it, rather than the common educational patterns of "elementitis" (teaching them isolated elements only, e.g. "You'll learn what math is for after you've mastered arithmetic") and "aboutitis" (teaching them *about* science rather than teaching them *to do* science).

In that vein: Is an educational "game" about astronomy going to teach students about astronomy, or to do (basic) astronomy? Is one about physics going to teach them the contents of physics textbooks, or about what it means to "do" physics?

If the latter: There may be a dramatic backstory and all, but we'd better have learners role-playing astronomers or physicists or etc. (implicitly at least, if not explicitly).

Or are we content teaching our students *about* what scientists have already figured out? That does seem to be the primary content of intro-level courses, especially for non-majors. (I suspect Perkins would criticize that approach.)

Thoughts?

Exoplanet Exploration Game

This article describes a fascinating looking game of exploration and discovery that may not necessarily be a science-oriented.  It seems to be more about storyline and 'discovering the secret of the solar system'.

Its a vague description and I bet I'm projecting all kinds of my own ideas onto it but I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Sébastien

EDIT: looking at the publisher's website I'm not sure how hopeful I should be.

redesigning, thinking…

Short post: I'm deeply embroiled in designing/redesigning my courses for the fall. For one (Computational Physics II), I'm adopting an approach that's a combination of "mastery" and "standards-based grading", with significant room for students to choose what to work on. I'm finding that this is consonant with some of the big principles of "game-like" course design. I'll post more details when I've (a) actually finished the design, and (b) have a bit of a breather to write something. Classes start Monday!

Q about this blog

I'm finding this blog rather inconvenient to keep up with, because my various blog software (MarsEdit for writing, NetNewsWire and Google Reader for reading) don't seem willing to connect to it, or even recognize it's existence. I suspect that's because of the privacy settings, though I would have thought there would be a way to tell these apps to authenticate.

Is anyone else here using blogging tools with success?