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App market in China 

This is a brief summary of the Games for a Digital Age report released by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center (Sesame Workshop related) on the challenges facing Digital Educational Games market. I recommend linking through to the full report. I am curious to know what the class thinks of the recommendations the report makes. One thing they emphasize is situating games as supplementary material - do you think this is a good thing/bad thing?

Two years ago, Bijani finished designing the world's first combat flight simulator for the blind: It is called Three-D Velocity, and it is now hugely popular. Gamers say it takes entertainment for the blind to the next level. Three-D Velocity sells for $43.99 on Bijani's website, and it has been downloaded more than 11,000 times since it first launched. All for a game with no graphics, on a computer screen that is blank, except for the name at the top. It's widely regarded as one of the best "audio games" on the market.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop studied almost 200 education apps for Apple's app store. Good insight into what's in the market right now and what the current trends are.

Thanks Chris! I am looking forward to reading this thoroughly. It covers so many important topics/questions from: creating standards for apps marketed as educational (right now the developers just need to say it is "educational") to a call to academia to dive into research and help design effective, high quality material for digital age learning.

Got ideas?!

No game noises made the list, but still an interesting thing to think about when it comes to design, marketing, and even possibly engagement

Social media and entertinment figures discuss how social media has changed the nature of consensus building, mass marketing and entertainment.

If anyone is interested in using games for education and learning in the Middle East, this short article provides a some information on the current state of the Arab video game market - challenges/opportunities/history.

This article provides a great overview of the new technologies profiled at SXSW and makes the case that it's now cheaper than ever before to bring prototypes to market. The author notes, "The dropping costs of designing and building inventive new hardware products has prompted a wave of creativity and innovation that echoes the software boom a decade or two ago in Silicon Valley." Makes me wonder... what's next?

This is about a report by HGSE's John Richards that we will need later in the semester

This is a nice article expressing one opinion on where games in educational publishing is going!

"Intel won't actually manufacturer the product, but it will offer the design license for free to any company interested in making it." Maybe the first open source hardware example I've seen. Will be interesting to see what, if any, effect this has on the ed tech tablet market.

Describes how Singapore publishers are pushing into the e-book market for education, including the development of e-assessment apps.

"Interactive books are everywhere, and have revolutionized the way people consume the printed word. With the recent software available to allow easy creation of interactive books and with the race to bring these products to market, there seems to be a more and more dilution of quality and a loss for the meaning of interactivity." ...And will they engage a larger group of readers than traditional flat text does? (Would love to see a study)

Makers and users of mobile apps for children, take note!

The actual report itself is excellent, "Mobile Apps for Kids: Current Privacy Disclosures Are Disappointing." [The link is embedded in the article.] Improvement in this area is critical. When apps came on the market, they were like "valet parking"... where a user could get directly to a software without roaming the web. This was an attractive feature (and avoided unwanted advertising, a plus for parents.). Now, not only are apps collecting data that we are unaware of (PRIVACY!), but many are engaged in advertising, some that we are aware of and some that we are not (click through to a website, etc.) "Staff found that about 7% of the 400 app store promotion pages indicated that the app contained advertising. As above, this number is likely to understate the number of apps containing advertising because app stores do not appear to require developers to disclose in-app advertising on their promotion pages, and because advertising is a common way to monetize apps." Free? Not so much.

Seth Godin is giving away a book online, encouraging it to be spread among teachers and getting hundreds of thousands of readers. He usually writes about marketing and the spread of ideas, but he takes on education in this series of blog-post-provocative-conversation-starting writing. He states, "School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it's not a goal we need to achieve any longer."

This article talks about how studios making MMOs for children are providing free usage but capitalizing on its engagement potential to take advantage of children's purchasing power.