Tag Archives: games

In the News

Games In Education Could Help Students Learn By Failing

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Using games in education can make learning more interesting and fun, but they also serve another purpose that is perhaps even more important–games teach us that it’s okay to fail.

If you think about it, failure is an essential part of learning and growing, yet in so many educational environments failure is discouraged. In this commencement speech, educational games designer Randall Fujimoto spoke about the importance of failure and how game-based learning helps students learn through failure.

via Games In Education Could Help Students Learn By Failing – Gamification Co.

In the News

Experience Time Warp With MIT’s New Special Relativity 3D Educational Game

Ever wonder what it would look like to travel at the speed of light? The folks at MIT’s education games lab have created a simple 3D simulator to teach the masses about the counterintuitive principles of one of physics’ most important concepts: special relativity. The professionally-designed, yet simple first-person game places users in a Lord of the Rings-looking town and slows down the speed of light as scattered light “orbs” are collected throughout the level video below. The goal of the project was to make something familiar that was very unfamiliar: the laws of special relativity. What would they look like in a familiar setting?,” says Sonny Sidhu, A Slower Speed of Light’s Game Producer.

via Experience Time Warp With MIT’s New Special Relativity 3D Educational Game | TechCrunch.

Blog

The Best of Raph Koster’s Web Site

If you’re interested in game design, you should know Raph Koster. Full stop.

Koster made his reputation working on Ultima Online and augmented it through his work on Star Wars Galaxies (where he worked as Chief Creative Officer). To my mind, though, some of his greatest contributions come via his writing on games and game theory. His deceptively simple A Theory of Fun remains, IMO, one of the best ways to introduce game design to neophytes. But on his personal web site, he has written over a quarter-million words, most of it devoted to elucidating some large or small idea about game design. It’s accessible to non-specialists, well-written (he double-majored in Creative Writing and Spanish, the second of which must have taught him excellent grammar!) , and smart without being precious. Most importantly, it’s content-rich. I could imagine using his blog to supply many readings for a graduate class on game design.

Koster’s done would-be game designers a service by selecting some of his best posts on game theory and design and collecting them under a single heading, which you can access by clicking the link below:

http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/15/the-best-articles/