Group items tagged

Children with autism spectrum disorders enjoy screen time, underscoring an opportunity to use interactive devices to encourage social learning. Despite how much children who have autism enjoy the stimulation of a computer or mobile device, few engage in social media pursuits, such as emailing or chatting, researchers found.

Greenlight for Girls uses various 2.0 tools to engage girls in informal learning to promote girls toward STEM careers. They compliment online work with on the ground, face-to-face conferences so that the online conversation has correlation with face-to-face experiences and interactions, making the online engagement more visceral.

After dinner, when Tom Beasley is ready to take a break from his day job in the Yale classics department, he busts out the comic books. But it's all in the name of education, with a digital twist. Beasley, a seventh-year graduate student, is writing his dissertation on Thucydides, chronicler of the Peloponnesian War. In his evening project, he turns from history to the mythology of the Trojan War - in particular, the comic book series Age of Bronze, written and illustrated by Eric Shanower. Beasley's task: produce a reader's guide to the richly detailed, 31-part (so far) comic series in preparation for its release as an iPad app, intended for classroom use. The digital version, called Age of Bronze "Seen," launches on October 15 and includes maps, genealogy charts, and other interactive features.

- background info on Summer 2012 launch of Scratch Jr. - to promote social interaction in learning the designers want to build a digital playground. "A good playground will have swing sets and slides for the kids, as well as benches and tables and chairs for the parents. The designers of Scratch Jr are figuring out how to embed the digital equivalent of those tables and chairs. "

The City University of New York connects educators from every campus and discipline at CUNY who are interested in games, simulations, and other forms of interactive teaching. They hope to facilitate the pedagogical uses of both digital and non-digital games, improve student success, and encourage research and scholarship in the developing field of games-based learning.

Research paper exploring how to create an engaging game experience

There doesn't appear to be much here as far as quntitative data, but I think this arena is ripe for further educational research.

Avatar stuff...mentioned in class

Thanks so much for finding and posting this!

Animal-assisted activities (AAA) provide opportunities for motivational, educational and/or recreational benefits to enhance a person's quality of life.