Category Archives: Gaming

This past fall, I wrote a blog post for the Cooney Center about my experiences at the annual DIY Days conference at UCLA.  In that post, I wrote [emphasis added in bold]: “Many of the people I met are deeply invested in new ways to approach the role of media in children’s learning ecologies.  I believe that various projects presented at DIY Days (including R<3S and another very special project I’ll share in a later post) have deep implications for…

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…

How does one know that an educational experience is actually helping students learn? Our company Motion Math makes educations games for the iPad and iPhone that let kids play with numbers. It’s easy for us to think, as we’re making our apps, and watching students play them, to believe that learning is happening, especially because we spend a lot of time ensuring that our designs follow good pedagogical and usability principles. However, the history of educational technology is littered with many false promises and disappointing results, most recently given an overview by Matt Richtel of The New York Times. For these reasons, and for our own self-understanding, it’s important that we sometimes hold our learning technologies up to scientific scrutiny.

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…

This post originally appeared on the Education Nation Learning Curve Blog. Last week, President Obama announced an innovation and competitiveness initiative designed to stimulate children’s interest in math and science careers. It was filled with solid ideas for engaging both struggling and advanced students in rigorous and relevant science and math study, but fell short in one arena that youth crave:  the use of digital technology.  In fact, a few weeks earlier the President asked parents to encourage kids to…

Games is the hottest word. Last week, on June 24th, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center launched the Games and Learning Publishing Council. It came at the end of the Games for Change week and the day after AMD Foundation’s Changing the Game Partner Summit. To put a fine point on it, one of the distinguished members of our new Council is Alex Games, Microsoft’s new Education Design Director. Alas, his pronunciation rhymes with llamas. The Cooney Center’s Games and Learning…

At Games for Change (G4C) last week, the audience was treated to a number of interesting discussions and keynotes surrounding current issues of video game play for learning and social change. Among the hot topics were of course the impending “Gamepocalypse” that will arguably come as a result of intense “Gamification,” but there was also measured discussion around how people are working to find out where “gamifying” is most helpful to learning and education, and plenty of evidence of exciting…

Al Gore doesn’t know THAT much about video games but who cares? He’s Al Gore, and he believes enough in their potential to have given the keynote speech today at the 8th Annual Games for Change conference at NYU where he pronounced, “Games are the new normal.” Gore is a warm and generous speaker and he gave plenty of credit where it was due, in particular to Bing Gordon, a partner at investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as…

Last week, our colleagues at Microsoft announced the full availability of the Kodu Game Lab for the PC and the launch of a nationwide Kodu Cup competition. The competition invites students, aged nine to 17 to design, build and submit their own video games. This post by Cooney Center Research Fellow Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges originally appeared on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential blog. There’s a growing body of evidence that both playing video games and making video games have promise as educational…