Category Archives: Gaming

A little while back I was playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare with one of my patients, we’ll call him Alex*.  Twenty minutes into our game, I was clearly losing badly and dying a lot.  Although I am a gamer-affirmative therapist, first-person shooters have never been a favorite of mine.  In fact it was only recently that I started playing them at home and with patients at all.  The game ended with me having died 25 times to his 2. …

January 10, 2013 marked the kick-off for Phase II of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Games and Learning Publishing Council. Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Council aims to expand the role of games and gaming in the educational lives of children by providing new research and analysis of the field of games-based learning. In its first year, the Council has expanded research and set forth a rigorous agenda for future work. Representing the diversity within the…

Every parent and concerned citizen in the U.S. has been following the national conversation about the need for a balanced response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. One area of concern that the President and Vice President highlighted in the action plan they presented last week is the role that media portrayals of violence may have on vulnerable children’s and their communities’ well-being. The President and Vice President have urged the Centers for Disease Control…

Every parent and concerned citizen in the U.S. has been following the national conversation about the need for an urgent and balanced response to the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  One area of concern that the President and Vice President highlighted in the action plan they presented on this week is the role that media portrayals of violence may have on vulnerable children’s well-being.  Our leaders will urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to…

Avast! Today marks an exciting day for our hornswoggling crew here at Launchpad Toys: Toontastic Jr. Pirates is LIVE in the App Store for iPhone and iPad! With 3 million cartoons created in over 150 countries, our first app – Toontastic – has been a great success for kids ages 6-12. Now, with the launch of Toontastic Jr. and our new StoryShare platform for online, creative Co-Play, little brothers and sisters as young as 3 years old can create their…

The Cooney Center and E-Line Media are preparing for the third year of the National STEM Video Game Challenge. This year’s competition is open to middle and high school youth, who are invited original game designs beginning in January 2013 for the opportunity to earn recognition and prizes for themselves, as well as monetary prizes for their schools. This year, we’ll also be offering opportunities for mentors to get involved through a new website featuring toolkits, resources and curriculum. Plus,…

Did you know that research shows that people who play video games tend to have better vision than those who don’t? According to cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier, who studies the impact of video games on the brain, gamers have quite a few advantages over those who don’t play often. Check out her TED Talk to learn more. We’re very excited to be working with Dr. Bavelier on the Gut Sense Action Video Game project — learn more about this exciting…

For this video case study, our fifth in the series, we interviewed three educators at St. Philip’s about their goals for using games: third grade classroom teacher Regina Lauricella, Director of 21st Century Learning Katrina Allen, and Director of Technology Jerri Drakes. All three speak eloquently about the process of introducing digital games into the curriculum and how using games has affected the way they think about teaching and learning at St. Philip’s Academy. It’s an evolving effort, but one that has a team of dedicated educators and enthusiastic students behind it. We hope to check in with St. Philip’s again and see their progress!

The Cooney Center has just kicked off an exciting multi-sector partnership with experts in neuroscience and learning, seasoned video game designers, and impact game publisher E-line Media to create an innovative video game that teaches fundamental math skills. This “Gut Sense” team brings together some of the world’s foremost experts in learning, brain plasticity, and videogames (Daphne Bavelier and Sean Green); number sense and its relation to school math achievement (Justin Halberda); children’s media (Michael Levine and Lori Takeuchi); media law (George Rose); designing action videogames (Sean Vesce and Mike Wikan); and publishing of learning games (Mike Angst and Alan Gershenfeld). This all-star cast is poised to create a videogame for children ages 7-11 that develops the brain’s numerical intuitions.

They say that every summer has a story, and now at the end of my experience teaching for the Gamestar Mechanic Online Learning Program, it’s time for my students’ stories to come to an end. But it’s wonderful to realize that for many of them getting more interested and involved with game design, this is just the beginning. As we wrapped up the program last week, my inbox was filled with an exciting flurry of final assignments, last chances to…