Group items tagged

allows you to play with aperture and shutterspeed etc

Girls and Games: What's the Attraction? Games are increasingly recognized by educators as a way to get kids excited about learning. While the stereotype of a "gamer" may evoke the image of a high school boy holed up in a dark room playing on a console, in reality 62 percent of gamers play with other people either in person or online, and 47 percent of all gamers are girls. Game developers and academics who have been studying the elements that go into making games more attractive to girls found that those very same qualities are also important components of learning. For instance, girls are more drawn to games that require problem solving in context, that are collaborative (played through social media) and that produce what's perceived to be a social good. They also like games that simulate the real word and are particularly drawn to "transmedia" content that draws on characters from books, movies, or toys.

Some of our successes include the Future School's 4Di Lab at Canberra primary school, Singapore, The immersive simulation lab at the 'Classroom of the Future' at the National Institute of Education, Singapore and the Mystery Matters online portal at the Centre for Learning Innovation, Department of Education and Training in New South Wales, Australia.

increases a child's memory capacity, computer and simulation fluency, helps with fast strategic thinking, hand eye coordination, benefits children with attention disorders, helps particular skill development 

lets you create games and simulations - good for kids to do programming/coding? $9.99

a high school teacher's blog about teaching physics with Valve's Portal 2.... He creates physics simulation videos - and the students do too.

re using Valve's portals and puzzle-maker to create science simulations -- and amazing play/maker experiences for kids

Computational thinking is a phrase that has received considerable attention over the past several years - but there is little agreement about what computational thinking encompasses, and even less agreement about strategies for assessing the development of computational thinking in young people. We are interested in the ways that design-based learning activities - in particular, programming interactive media - support the development of computational thinking in young people. Over the past several years, we have developed a computational thinking framework that emerged from our studies of the activities of interactive media designers. Our context is Scratch - a programming environment that enables young people to create their own interactive stories, games, and simulations, and then share those creations in an online community with other young programmers from around the world. The first part of the paper describes the key dimensions of our computational thinking framework: computational concepts (the concepts designers engage with as they program, such as iteration, parallelism, etc.), computational practices (the practices designers develop as they engage with the concepts, such as debugging projects or remixing others' work), and computational perspectives (the perspectives designers form about the world around them and about themselves). The second part of the paper describes our evolving approach to assessing these dimensions, including project portfolio analysis, artifact-based interviews, and design scenarios. We end with a set of suggestions for assessing the learning that takes place when young people engage in programming.

This is an interactive where students can set up scenarios for a meteor hitting the earth.  They can set projectile parameters, impact parameters, target parameters and distance from impact to calculate the impact of a, hopefully theoretical, meteor.

This is a game focused on development and energy resources.

Virtual tour of water saving house

Nice set of Science interactives done in HTML 5 that can be embedded.