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Posts tagged ‘design’

27
Aug

You Have Died of Dysentery: Games in Education are Still Alive

Michael A. Hawker and Brett Wortzman presented this talk at PAXDev 2014 about how non-educational games can have educational value in the classroom.  Synopsis:

In the early nineties, traditional educational games such as Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego and Oregon Trail pioneered the way for learning to be fun (and taught us that you can only carry 200 pounds of meat back to your wagon). Since then, the educational games market has not borne the same success as today’s major game franchises. However, it is possible for ‘traditional’ games not specifically designed to be educational to have curricular value. We will show how we have used a wide range of games and game concepts to provide a familiar context for students to engage with new material and principles of Computer Science.  In addition, we will discuss how game professionals can find a place for their games in the classroom.

Presentation Slides and Notes

31
Mar

New Web Series: First Play

We’ve started another web series entitled ‘First Play’ where we play games for the first time and comment on their design points.

In our first episode we play Mini Metro.

Check our YouTube Channel every Tuesday for new episodes.

5
Jun

Impossible Figures

Impossible Figure Creator

Well, it’s been a while since posting any news.  I’ll have an entry about that later.

Good news is amongst teaching and taking classes, some things get done.  Of course it helps when part of that is because it’s a project for class.  As in this case, the Impossible Figure Creator was born.

It’s the final project in my Visual Communication class which wraps up my graduate certificate in User Centered Design.

Try it out, create a masterpiece and save it for the world to see.

26
Dec

Trials and Tribulations in Creating a Complex Two-Tiered Leveling System

I must say when I set out to do this task, I figured it wouldn’t take me a few days of thinking to figure out. What was I trying to do? Something seemingly simple, a blend of mathematics for the leveling system in my new game…

Aside: Now, I used to love math when I was a kid. I was good at it, it made sense, and it let you do a lot of cool stuff. I still realize its importance, but university pretty much killed my love for math by making me memorize formulas I knew how to use to take tests… And if you don’t know already, my memory is like a sieve…

Anyway, the world of video games usually involves a lot of these calculations, and I’ll laboriously call back my skills and try and figure things out. Usually this is difficult late at night after working all day, so it’ll usually take me a couple of days on and off thinking about the problem in different ways to solve it. This is just another one of those stories…

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