Category Archives: Game Design

Allison Mishkin teaches at a game design camp for middle school students. Here she shares some of the lessons that she’s learned — and tries to impart — to her students during this week-long sessions.   A group of students stumble into a computer lab on a bright spring day, unsure why their parents wanted them out of the house on their vacations. By the end of the day, they would emerge optimistic and excited for the week to come.…

“Radical change” and “storm the Bastille” were the rallying cries of the inspirational opening keynote of the 2nd Annual New School Venture Fund Summit, held on May 2, 2012 in San Francisco, CA.   This invite-only conference attracts big names from the education reform movement, including:  school chancellors from Newark and Washington DC, representatives from the US Department of Education, charter school network leaders, educational technology entrepreneurs and of course the venture capital managers who invest in them. The Joan Ganz Cooney…

Through case studies, roundtables, lectures and demos, the Games for Change Festival (June 18­-20, NYC) highlights models for collaboration on game development and distribution, bridging the gap between commercial and issue driven games. Featured presentations include game designer and author of Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal, leading researcher, Dr. James Paul Gee, Valve Software, Navid Khonsari (Grand Theft Auto, Alan Wake), and Chris Bell (WAY, Journey). Highlighting the discussions on Games in Cultural Spaces will be representatives from the TATE,…

There may only be 2 days left to enter the National STEM Video Game Challenge but the STEM never stops. The Museum of Mathematics is offering a cash prize of $25,000 through the inaugural Rosenthal Prize for Innovation in Math Teaching.  The Prize is designed to recognize and promote hands-on math teaching in the upper elementary and middle school classroom. To learn more, visit rosenthalprize.momath.org.

This post was originally published by Gamestar Mechanic Teacher Blog.  For full coverage of the National Stem Video Game Challenge, click here. Last week, I googled 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge and read through 15 full pages of search results where people and organizations shared their excitement for this year’s STEM competition. I also experienced this excitement first hand in Norfolk, VA the first weekend in February as I participated in NSU’s TechFest by giving workshops on game design for…

The developer’s prize for the first National STEM Video Game Challenge went to Filament Games, headed by Dan White and Dan Norton, for You Make Me Sick, a game in which students design a bacteria or virus and attempt to infect a target host. Creative Director Dan Norton writes in with an update and shares some tips for aspiring game designers interested in entering this year’s National STEM Video Game Challenge.   Hi everyone! I’m Dan Norton, Creative Director at…