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Elegy lets players write prose and poetry as they explore distant planets and dead civilizations. The player faces 27 challenges in three worlds, each riffing on a specific British Romance-era poem: “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” by John Keats, and “Darkness” by Lord Byron. The different challenges find the player in various roles: an emperor rallying his troops before a doomed battle, for example, or a schoolgirl evacuating a city being bombed. Players travel through beautifully designed backgrounds, while on-screen text narrates the story. But much of the text is left blank—that’s when players tap their inner Wordsworths, finishing the tale with their own imaginations.

1968 is when it all changed. On December 9 that year, Douglas Engelbart, a computer scientist at Stanford Research Center, made a 90-minute video presentation that revolutionized the world of computers. He didn't show up on stage at the Computer Conference in San Francisco, instead, he teleconferenced from his research lab 30 miles away -- an unprecedented feat at the time. Now almost half a century later, "the mother of all demos" is being resurrected as an avant garde opera called The Demo. Composers Mikel Rouse and Ben Neill re-imagine Engelbart's demo and the defining moments in his life that led up to it through a hybrid theater performance.

In Pineapple, you play the role of a principal in charge of a school and your ultimate goal is to earn as much funding as possible. To do that, you need to ensure it produces the highest standardized test scores throughout a dozen different scenarios. By dehumanizing kids and turning them into pineapples (read: statistics) that makes it easier because "pineapples," as they exist here, excel at testing and nothing else.

My original plan was to raise him thinking he was living in a computer simulation, but sadly, my wife vetoed it. And any other potentially harmful, but funny, life-altering scenarios.

What happens when a 21st-century kid plays through video game history in chronological order?

There's no denying Wikipedia's usefulness, but French computer science student Owen Cornec believes the website could stand to display entries "in a more engaging way." Thus, he created WikiGalaxy: a special Wikipedia browser that visualizes the website as a 3D galaxy. Each star represents an article, and related entries form clusters of stars -- clicking a star loads the entry itself on the left-hand panel and links to relevant articles on the right. If you want to make browsing Wiki even more interactive, you can activate "fly-mode," which sends you zooming through the stars with each click. It's a really fun way to discover new articles, and you have to try it out if you can.

“Students who gain access to a home computer between the 5th and 8th grades tend to witness a persistent decline in reading and math scores,” the economists wrote, adding that license to surf the Internet was also linked to lower grades in younger children.In fact, the students’ academic scores dropped and remained depressed for as long as the researchers kept tabs on them. What’s worse, the weaker students (boys, African-Americans) were more adversely affected than the rest. When their computers arrived, their reading scores fell off a cliff.

We don’t know why this is, but we can speculate. With no adults to supervise them, many kids used their networked devices not for schoolwork, but to play games, troll social media and download entertainment. (And why not? Given their druthers, most adults would do the same.)

Babies born to low-income parents spend at least 40 percent of their waking hours in front of a screen — more than twice the time spent by middle-class babies. They also get far less cuddling and bantering over family meals than do more privileged children. The give-and-take of these interactions is what predicts robust vocabularies and school success. Apps and videos don’t.

If we produced high quality work, they would tell other people about it. That became and continues to be one of the driving forces behind our work.

But if you simply follow in the footsteps of people before, at best you’ll become a pale imitation, at works completely ignored.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is that people want quality. Quality rises to the top and stands the test of time.And you don’t create quality by copying what you’ve seen work.

Proctortrack, however, seems to impose more onerous strictures on students than a live proctor would. Among other things, it requires students to sit upright and remain directly in front of their webcams at all times, according to guidelines posted on the company’s site.“Changes in lighting can flag your test for a violation,” the guidelines say. And, “Even stretching, looking away, or leaning down to pick up your pencil could flag your test.”

Never Alone There’s little debate that games have not represented indigenous cultures well. As a result, it’s been best for students to learn about topics like Native America via traditional means. Never Alone, however, sets a precedent for respectful representation of indigenous people. It was co-developed with native Alaskans, and it illuminates Inupiat stories, themes and values, weaving into play important concepts like interconnectedness and valuable skills like cooperation. Best of all, it features documentary-style videos of the Inupiat people who provide first person context for the conceptual and cultural learning embedded in the game.