HGSET545

This was a great succinct article with easy to follow principles. Thanks for sharing.

interesting TED talk inlight of our recent readings

In this talk, Csikzentmihalyi goes further than describing flow as an important experience for intrinsic motivation. Is happiness a state of flow too? It is an interesting perspective though I'm sure it's not the only perspective.

Very good synthesis of applying Flow in Education; in time for next Monday's topic on Flow. Good takeaways in the "Implications for Teachers" section.

Thanks for sharing Malik. I think this article provides a nice overview of flow and one main takeaway was the importance of positive affect. I agree that it is a good predictor of flow in an activity.

An application-oriented paper that explores designing effective learning games through the use of Flow, Motivation and Fun.

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

Providing multiple means of access to improve engagement- here is a way to add subtitles to instructional videos posted on Youtube.  

Grockit makes Test Prep products for the GMAT, SAT, ACT, LSAT, GRE and other university admissions tests.

Katy Salen's views - but what does the research say?

Gamification is one of their high impact technologies

This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

Great demonstration of engaging graduate/undergraduates in course materials at MIT

Disney's Connected Learning program has been developing games for 6 years now, the most popular title being Club Penguin. They are currently planning to roll out several pre-school titles and are also capturing data on the games effects on learning outcomes. Interesting to see Disney attracting top talent from the gaming industry to help develop games and also not shying away from doing the research to investigate educational outcomes.