HGSET545

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.

Is engagement in the theater with Twitter going too far?

A very inspiring story! This is an example of engagement, motivation and flow coming together! If this 15 year-old boy can achieve this, why can we not foster it in other children? 

report documenting measurement of STEM interest

How to keep students engaged in STEM while in high school

"Popcorn Maker makes it easy to enhance, remix and share web video. Use your web browser to combine video and audio with content from the rest of the web - from text, links and maps to pictures and live feeds"

Some background about educational games

This is a great clip summarizing the main points of Dan Pink's 'Drive'. It challenges some myths we have about what motivates us and provides some interesting experiments to back up the conclusions.

fabulous, video. Matthew. Touches directly on course topics and readings

Good summary of the principles for designing learning experiences. 

Professor Rosalind W. Picard, ScD is founder and director of the Affective Computing research group at the MIT Media Lab, co-director of the Things That Think consortium, and leader of the new and growing Autism & Communication Technology Initiative at MIT. In April 2009 she co-founded Affectiva, Inc., where she serves as chairman and chief scientist.

Thanks for sharing Rupangi. This tool could provide so much valuable feedback to educators as they design formal and informal learning environments for students. There are two things which I think any educator should be very aware about before implementing it though: 1. The privacy of the data and who has access to it 2. The steps that can be taken to prevent a misinterpretation of the data.