Peacemaker challenges you to make peace

PeaceMaker challenges you to succeed as a leader where others have failed. Experience the joy of bringing peace to the Middle East or the agony of plunging the region into disaster. PeaceMaker will test your skills, assumptions and prior knowledge. Play it and you will never read the news the same way again. Read more.

School Sees Better Days in the Future

The promise of technology and change, so far, has fallen short at Philadelphia’s School of the Future.

By Kathleen Kennedy Manzo

As it was conceived, the School of the Future was to be a study in contrast to the typical big-city high school.When the $62 million facility opened in 2006 with a relatively small student population, a computer-based curriculum delivered with the latest technology tools, and a unique partnership with corporate giant Microsoft, it set out to upend a secondary school model that had changed little since the industrial era and had spelled failure for too many students here and in cities around the country.  Read more.

Gaming our way to musical genius

Video games are changing our relationship with music for the better

Winda Benedetti Citizen Gamer

My singing voice is so bad, I don’t even sing in the shower. And although I took years of piano lessons as a child, and though my parents and teachers insisted that I was at least somewhat musically inclined at the time, I can’t seem to remember how to plink out anything more challenging than “Heart and Soul” these days.

Despite my general lack of musical aptitude, I love music. I love listening to it. I love dancing to it. I love watching other people performing it. And as I watch others up there on stage, I occasionally fantasize about the rock star life I could have lived … if only I’d learned to sing … or maybe stuck with those piano lessons. Read more.

Fluvanna County Virginia, i-Pod Proposal Discussed at School Board Meeting

Chris O’Neal and Marguerite Matics gave a presentation on a proposed iPod pilot project. According to O’Neal, the aim of this project is to engage students at a higher-level using the latest technology.

The project would place a set of iPods in one classroom at each of Fluvanna’s schools. Thirty iPods are in each classroom set; the total cost would be about $44,000. Each member of the school board and Dr. Smith was provided an iPod to accompany the hands-on presentation. All agreed that it was engaging but concerns were raised about if this was a good use of money. Read More.

Understanding the economics of ‘EverQuest II’

RALEIGH, North Carolina – Virtual economies set up in video games as players trade items are being used as case studies to track and model real-world economies.

As more people join massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game worlds like Activision Blizzard’s “World of Warcraft,” NCsoft’s “Aion” and Atari’s”Champions Online,” real money is being used to purchase virtual items through micro-transactions.

As a result, game worlds are creating virtual economies.

With the global recession impacting consumer spending — and the sales of video games — a research group is using Sony Online Entertainment’s “EverQuest II” as a case study to explore how virtual economies mirror real-world economies. Read more.

Quest to Learn Launches!

Institute of Play’s new school, Quest to Learn, has opened and we here at A Gamers Education wish them all the luck!

Quest to Learn Opens!
The Institute of Play is delighted to announce the opening of Quest to Learn, the new NYC public school that uses game-inspired methods to teach both traditional and critical 21st century skills and literacies.  Read more.

Serious Games For Nintendo DS: Learn Series

Via: Future-Making Serious Games – Dreamcatcher Interactive Expands Its Learn Series Of Educational Titles For The Nintendo DS

Games publisher Dreamcatcher Interactive has announced Learn Geography, an educational title for the Nintendo DS aimed at students between the first and fourth grades to be released on November 17, 2009.  There are currently four titles in all, read more.

World of Warcraft in schools!

A new wiki has been started to research the use of World of Warcraft for education.  In the creators own words…

“The primary focus of this project is to develop a curriculum for an after school program or “club” for at-risk students at the middle and/or high school level.  This program would use the game, World of Warcraft, as a focal point for exploring Writing/Literacy, Mathematics, Digital Citizenship, Online Safety, and would have numerous projects/lessons intended to develop 21st-Century skills.” More info.

Game uses fun as incentive to solve hard chip-design problems

A new game prototype called FunSAT from University of Michigan computer scientists Valeria Bertacco and Andrew DeOrio marries human intuition to computerized chip design to solve problems that computers are bad at by making it fun for humans to help them:

“By solving challenging problems on the FunSAT board, players can contribute to the design of complex computer systems, but you don’t have to be a computer scientist to play. The game is a sort of puzzle that might appeal to Sudoku fans.” Read more.

Professor tries to show future teachers how to make math fun

CHARLOTTESVILLE — Algebra is a hands-on subject for students in Michael D. Smith’s graduate-level classes at the University of Virginia.

“We have used Jenga blocks, colored pencils and bulls-eyes, Frisbees, encrypted messages, cinder blocks, two-by-fours and contra dancing,” said Smith, who is teaching his popular summer course, Proofs in Algebra, to graduate students and some advanced undergraduates.

Algebra is the study of the familiar logic rules governing the addition of real numbers and the search for other objects governed by the same rules, he said.

Smith, 29, a member of the summer faculty, uses contra dancing to show all the reflections and rotations of a square.  Read more.