Category Archives: Gaming

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…

Do video games cause violence behavior in children? Are they ruining their minds? Despite scientific evidence that refutes these assumptions, why does the media still think video games are damaging for kids? That question was addressed by Scott Steinbergin, tech consultant and founder of GameExec magazine and Game Industry TV, in a great CNN piece a few weeks ago. In case you missed it, check it out:  Why Does the Media Still Think Video Games are Bad for Kids? In…