Gaming and the liberal arts

"A free online game about rural poverty in developing nations."

Brecht Vandenbroucke Minecraft is the hot new videogame among teachers and parents. It's considered genuinely educational: Like an infinite set of programmable Lego blocks, it's a way to instill spatial reasoning, math, and logic-the skills beloved by science and technology educators. But from what I've seen, it also teaches something else: good old-fashioned reading and...

Reacting to the Past game book.

"HabWorlds Beyond is a new type of online science course. What sets it apart from the current generation of online courses and MOOCs? Emphasizes learning by doing Students learn by doing as they create and destroy stars, hunt for planets, and search for signs of life."

Thinking about trying this out. Do you know anything more about it?

These sound more like simulations. Good stuff.

That sounds awesome!

PAXsims is pleased to feature a number of blog posts from David Romano (Missouri State University) on teaching International Relations through popular games, culture and simulations. Today he introduces the topic. Stay tuned for parts two, three, four, and five in the near future. * * * Introduction Politics as "the struggle for power" surrounds us.

Nice, just sent the general paxsims site to Mike Fratanuano last week.

Descriptions of playing through the Ivanhoe game.

Connect * Create * Inspire The Ivanhoe Game is about making connections, bridging disciplines, highlighting subjectivity, and engaging students with an alternative pedagogical approach. This WP Theme allows teachers to convert WordPress, already often used in the classroom, into an exciting environment where students can manipulate and play with a cultural object.

"e-athletes"?

Fascinating idea for a cultural game.

Now that looks like fun.

Very useful data on K-12: "We have an early look at some of the interesting data coming out of a larger report on teacher attitudes around the use of games in the classroom. The numbers hint at wider use of games in the classroom and indicate teachers see the real benefit of games in helping low-performing students."

A fine way to think about history in these games. I like the preceding post as well, http://www.playthepast.org/?p=4260 .