Thunder

The findings from the ‘Summit on Educational Games, Harnessing the power of video games for learning’ organised by the Federation of American Scientists can now be viewed online. The summit was convened to discuss ways to accelerate the development, commercialization, and deployment of new generation games for learning.

The Summit focused on four issues: video game features useful for learning and aspects of learning that could be supported by video games, research needed to support the effective use of games for education and training, market barriers, and changes in schools that might be needed to take advantage of educational games.

Last year I was chatting to Karl Royle from Wolverhampton University about gaming and he mentioned a project he was involved in ‘e-games league‘.  After chatting to a couple of local headteachers they agreed to pilot the scheme this year with students in year 10.

Last week I was able to get in to Thomas Adams school to have a look at an e-games lesson, the students were motivated and engaged in their ICT activities.  At the end of the lesson they played Fantastic Four on the xbox against each other.  More information can be found on the e-games blog on the ‘what is it?‘ page.
After chatting to the teacher after the lesson we decided to get the students to set up their own blogs to record their work as they progress through the course.  If you have a spare couple of minutes could you visit on the the clan blogs and leave a comment on their logo:

• Die Hard Horse Lovers
• Game Over
• Hellz Angels
• J2R
• Mestevious2
• Spurs

Having successfully installed Bootcamp onto my mac, I have now installed GameMaker and MissionMaker and they are working well.  Now I can get rid of my laptop.  There appears to be no issues at present with this installation but I will keep you informed if anything untoward happens.

Unfortunately two of my favourite pieces of software, Mission Maker and Gamemaker, don’t run on a Mac so I spoke to my friends at Apple and they suggested using Parallels.  Early this week I downloaded it and on my second attempt managed to get it working, what a weird sight that was seeing Windows XP running within Mac OS X.  Using my 15 day trial I installed Gamemaker and it appeared to be working well until I tried to run the game and I hit an error, it appears that Parallels runs everything as native to Intel/Windows EXCEPT the graphic sub-system, which is emulated.

So now that Parallels has failed :(  and I was really looking forward to it working so I didn’t have to use reboot to run Windows, it looks like I am going to give Bootcamp a go.  I will give it a go this week and let you now what happens (fingers crossed).

Futurelab have published their findings from their one year project. This report outlines the context, objectives, methods, findings and key messages arising from the Teaching with Games project.

The report:

• offers an overview of teachers’ and students’ use of computer games and attitudes towards computer games in schools
• identifies factors which impact upon the incorporation of computer games into existing school practices
• describes the processes by which teachers plan and implement games-based learning in existing curricular contexts.

ELSPA (the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association), in association with the Department for Education and Skills’ personalised content team, today launched a new report which examines the role computer and video games can play in education.

I haven’t had time to read the report yet, but you can download it from here.

I have now returned back home after two excellent days in Glasgow at SETT ‘06, where I was presenting ‘Thinking out of the xbox- game making for learning’ in the Learning Village.

Hopefully I have inspired some of the Scottish teachers to go away and get their students to write computer games using either GameMaker or Mission Maker.

It would be great if any of the teachers who were at SETT and are going to embark on game making could leave a comment or drop me an email, maybe we could develop a collaborative project?

I have just been alerted to this conference:

Hand to Eye conference: ‘What do we learn from games?’

Videogames are changing the way we teach and learn so as part of GameCity the annual interactive entertainment festival in Nottingham, we would like to invite you to the Hand to Eye conference.

The conference will be held on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th October and will host some of the leading speakers from the videogames, academic and creative industries. It aims to explore some of the subtleties, opportunities and truths about player’s experiences of videogames and interactive entertainment used specifically in the learning environment, Hand to Eye offers

â–ª Specific examples of the implicit learning strategies in commercial gameplay.
â–ª Examples of commercial videogames being used and adapted in the classroom.
▪ Blue sky projections – learning in and with videogames.

Hand to Eye is for

â–ª IT leads in RDAs, local councils and government who understand how the new generation of school leavers will change the face of the workforce forever
â–ª Educators interested in learning how the classroom techniques utilising videogame technology
â–ª Games industry professionals who can engage directly with the core of these new markets.

To learn more about how you and your organisation can benefit, come to GameCity, the only event of its kind in Europe. For more details on the conference package, go to www.handtoeye.net.

I have just spent the last 30mins playing on some maths games produced by 2Simple software.

A suite of six fast paced games designed to make learning mathematics fun, effective and meaningful. In traditional arcade style, these games are set to engage children from their first click whilst the high pace of learning will keep them striving to improve.

• Factoroids - break down the factors into equal parts.
• Dividers - target each number with the correct divider.
• FracWall - arrange the fractions to create a whole.
• BondBubbles - join the bubbles to recall number facts.
• SeqSnake - work out the sequence to grow the snake.
• FunkyPlatform - use the calculation platforms to reach the target number.

The software is aimed at Key Stage 2, but I could have used it with KS3 classes. The software tracks your progress so you don’t have to start from scratch each time.  I found the games enjoyable, so why not give it a go yourselves, you can download a 30 day trial from their website.

Via the seriousgames maillist I came across an article in the Scotsman, I would be keen to hear from any of my Scottish readers who could shed any more light on this for me.