Level Up Book Club

Each time the students created a new avatar, Whiting would assign them to a different pod, or small group, within Teen Second Life. Pods of four or five students would virtually fly to a private space where they used chat tools to discuss a set of questions posed by Whiting.

Paul Andersen has been teaching science in Montana for the last eighteen years.  He explains how he is using elements of game design to improve learning in his AP Biology classroom.  Paul's science videos have been viewed millions of times by students around the world.  He was the 2011 Montana Teacher of the Year and he is currently a science teacher at Bozeman High School.  For more information on Paul's work visit http://www.bozemanscience.co

. People are motivated by progress. People are motivated by social validation. These designs have just taken things people already want to do – learning stuff, going places, getting fit – and motivated people to do them more by making it easier for users to a) track their progess and b) tell other people what they’re doing.

The most important things about a game is that it offers an experience that is enjoyable in itself. If a game is designed well, people will play it just for the entertainment. Very few gamifcation examples seem to remember this, and so not many focus on creating a fantastic gaming experience as their priority, but there are some.

In his book Playful Design, John Ferrara talks about the game Foldit. The game gives users puzzles to complete based on protein folding and scientists examine the solutions provided by the highest scorers to see if there is anything that can be applied to real-life proteins. One of the solutions helped scientists to decipher the structure of an AIDs-causing monkey virus – remarkably, something they’d been trying to do for 15 years before they got Foldit players on the case

Kodu is a rich tool for narrative creation and storytelling

Construct - This is similar to Game Maker but it's totally free, has a nicer interface and can produce some really great results - well worth a look!

With expensive consoles stuck in long cycles, iPhone has transformed from a poor phone with no third-party content into a retina-screened gaming powerhouse with over half a million apps to choose from in less time than it took Sony to make Gran Turismo 5.

You don't reach a billion based on a spectacularly unoriginal physics game and some cartoon birds alone. It needed the ecosystem, installed base and cool cultural cachet of Apple.