Learning Games & Simulations Archives

Eat Candy, Win Prizes!

Business & Marketing, Learning Games & Simulations, User Experience Design

What’s old is new again, and I’m not talking about Cracker Jacks. They never went away, and neither did the “prize” inside. The old and new that I’m talking about is gamification – the application of game mechanics and techniques to make...

Using Social Media and Game Mechanics Improve Learning

Educational Technology, Learning Games & Simulations, Social Media

Do you hear what I hear? After reading Social Networking in Schools on the Huffington Post today, I recognized that nearly every project I’ve worked on over the past year has pointed towards a new round of convergence — a mash-up of social media,...

Virtual Play Patterns

Learning Games & Simulations

My colleague Scott Traylor of 360 Kid regularly writes thoughtful and timely pieces about kids, toys and digital media, and his latest article for the May 2009 issue of Playthings Magazine is no exception. What Works For Virtual Play? – Questions to Ask About...

Serious Games Showcase

Learning Games & Simulations

Serious games and simulations embrace subjects as diverse as health care, emergency preparedness, world history, algebra, ethics, emotional intelligence, team building. Thanks to Eliane Alhadeff for showcasing some of this diversity in these slides.

Making Virtual Worlds Accessible

Business & Marketing, Learning Games & Simulations, Next Tech

After developing educational technology products for Pearson and Scholastic, I’ve come to appreciate the value of creating products that are accessible to users with vision-, hearing- and learning-related disabilities. Whether because they are English language...

Being There: the Game as Narrative

Learning Games & Simulations, The Anthropocene

Narrative story telling has been part of the the human experience since we told tales of the days hunt around the fire, about what it was like to “be there” when this or that event happened. From that oral tradition, we learned to write them in pictures,...