Angry Birds

Here is a great post on using Angry Birds for assessment.

“Angry Birds” – A Lesson in Assessment FOR Learning

Scratch Pacman

So I have dedicated more hours to creating a scratch pacman game then I would like to admit, and I am having some issues... My pacman character moves though some walls and not others. Now before you say that makes no sense allow me to elaborate. I have created a maze for the pacman character to navigate though. I have told it that when I touches the black of the walls to stop moving, and when it touches some black walls it stops... and when it touches other black walls it does not. I remember Dr. Gee talking about pleasurable frustration during his elluminate session with my class last week, and one thing is for sure I am frustrated, weather it is pleasurable, I am not so sure.

Dr. Gee

Dr. James Gee was a guest speaker this week for my Digital Game Based Learning class. The entire hour he spent with us was great and he provided some great in site into games and their potential educational use in the classroom. One statement that stood out for me was when he mentioned that he was not advocating that games are used for teaching what he was most interested in was “that they recruit very good learning, they organize learning in a very good way.“
This was great for me to hear because I was struggling with the fact that most games that are created for education are not that good, and when you try to use commercially developed games and then try to find educational value in them, at time you find yourself grasping at straws.

Here are a number of points that Dr. Gee had that I thought were very good, there are more but I didn’t want to transcribe the entire hour.

• video games are just a way to solve problems
• people are gamers in quite different ways, people learn in different ways there is not one type of learner, in the same way there is not one type of gamer
• I am not advocating that we use games for everybody, in fact I am not even advocating that we even have to use games, what interests me about games is that they recruit very good learning, they organize learning in a very good way.
• They are about problem solving, they are not about facts and retention or memorizing stuff, they are about whether you can solve a problem. All a game is a set of problems and then a reward usually winning or getting out of a level or finishing those problems.
• They (games) lower the cost of failure, and the reason you want to lower the cost of failure is because if failure is too consequential people won’t explore it, they won’t take risks, they won’t try new things, they won’t try new styles. In school sometimes the risk of failure is I get a bad grade it means I am a bad person, in a game it means I start again from the last save.
• There is nothing more important to learning when you are learning something difficult, which is the only things worth learning, than persisting past failure.
• There is a word that people use for an essential, core necessity for learning, they call it grit, grit is persistence plus passion.

Great Post About Girls and Video Games

GeekDad has a great post about co-playing video games with girls. Have a look.

Scratch Name game

For the past few days I have been playing working with a program call Scratch. Is a program out of MIT that allows you to create and share projects that you have created. I have to say I think I am hooked. Once I started to go though the beginner tutorial it was clear that this could be a lot of fun. I have done some work like this with Lego Robotics, but I think this is even easier and you get results much faster. I spent about two hours yesterday creating a name game, simply making each letter in my name do something different, and today I planned on putting the finishing touches on it and post it. Well I ran into a snag, as engaged as I was I forgot to save my fist Scratch game. Oh well lesson learned. Here is what I created the second time around, one thing I did learn on the first try was I created a sprite of my full name and then added the individual letters over top of the full name. That way I was able to keep the letters in line.

Let me know what you think.

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/tuckwood/1575008

Oh and there are a few controls:
Left, Right, Up and down arrows
The 'b' and the Space Bar
The mouse

Conspiracy Code Intensive Reading (reading literacy through gaming) [VIDEO]

Conspiracy Code Intensive Reading (reading literacy through gaming) [VIDEO]

Launchball

Launchball

I planned on playing the game launchball for about half an hour... about three hours later I was thoroughly immersed in the game. Lanuchball is a very simple looking game that requires you to launch a ball into a ‘goal’ area. This seems simple enough but you add obstacles and a number of different objects that bounce, pull, push or stop the ball from moving and you have a very engaging and difficult game. Like any good game the levels become progressively more difficult adding more obstacles and a number of additional objects that the player can use to move the ball along.

While there is no doubt that this is an engaging game, I find myself struggling to nail down what students would learn from playing this game. One skill that virtually every game teaches is problem solving, launchball is no different. One thing I struggle with is that I am not a science and math guy, so although I know there are some principals of science and math incorporated into this game I have a hard time nailing them down. Electricity, force and magnetism are all in the game, but I am not sure how much is actually being learned.