Good Web Tools to Create Educational Games for Your Class

May 1, 2014
In today's post, I am sharing with you some great web tools that you can use with your students in class to create games. You can integrate these tools in different learning tasks. You can, for instance, use them for end of school year review projects or as  a way to boost the textbook activities.

1- Purpose Games

Purpose Games allows you to create, play and share  games. Using Purpose Games you will be able to create your own custom games to use with your students. You can for instance create a quiz game based on an image you upload from your computer and where you place dots for questions or you can create similar game but this time using shapes for questions. Another great feature Purpose Games offers to teachers is the ability to create a classroom group where you can let your students practice, get assignment and take tests.

2- Scratch
With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community. Scratch helps young people learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively — essential skills for life in the 21st century. Scratch is a project of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. It is provided free of charge.

Watch this video to learn more about Scratch

3- Jeopardy Labs

JeopardyLabs allows you to create a customized jeopardy template without PowerPoint. The games you make can be played online from anywhere in the world. Building your own jeopardy template is a piece of cake. Just use our simple editor to get your game up and running.

4- Game Maker Studio

GameMaker: Studio caters to entry-level novices and seasoned game development professionals equally, allowing them to create cross-platform games in record time and at a fraction of the cost! In addition to making games development 80 percent faster than coding for native languages, developers can create fully functional prototypes in just a few hours, and a full game in just a matter of weeks.

5- Minecraft

Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things. It can also be about adventuring with friends or watching the sun rise over a blocky ocean. It’s pretty. Brave players battle terrible things in The Nether, which is more scary than pretty. You can also visit a land of mushrooms if it sounds more like your cup of tea.

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The Benefits of Games on Learning and literacy

May 26, 2014
James Paul Gee is one of the renowned scholars and authors in the field of New Literacies Studies. Most of Gee's work over the last few years focused on the study and analysis of digital and video games. His book " What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" is a culmination of his work in this field.

In this book, Gee analyses some popular games such as first-person shooter games, fantasy role-playing games, real-time strategy games, and simulation games and draws out a set of learning principles that are embedded within these games and which make them  more engaging, challenging, and ultimately fun to play. Comparing the kind of learning that takes place in these gaming affinity spaces to the one that take place in school environments, Gee found out that the "levels of textual and cognitive interaction in traditional schooling are decidedly wanting" (Kalantzis & Cope,  "Literacies" ).

Gee contends that gaming affinity spaces where gamers get to virtually meet and discuss the content of their games, help each other solve game-related problems, these spaces are multimodal sites of literacy in which students navigate narratives as powerful as any in the literary canon." They do this as character, as players, as actors in the narrative. They negotiate text and image."

Upon the analysis of several video games , Gee sketched out some of the main benefits these games have for learning and literacy. The table below taken from Literacies(a book I am reading this week) features some of them.

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11 Reasosn Why You Should Integrate Games in Your Teaching

May 24, 2014
Games are ubiquitous digital activities that students , regardless of their grade level, engage in online. They play them on their computers, smart phones, with each other and with others they have never met. Several scientific studies published in this regard speak for the advocacy of game integration in education (see the list of resources at the end of this post). I have spent sometime reading some of these studies and came up with the list below featuring the main reasons why you need to consider using games in your teaching.

1-   Games  combine  activities that require movement, listening, speaking, reading, and writing. As such games activate both the right and left sides of the brain. According to Judy Dodge (author of 25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom, 2009), "If you're only listening, you're only activating one part of the brain, but if you're drawing and explaining to a peer, then you're making connections in the brain."

2- Gaming activities stimulates kids brain., and as Ben Mardell, PhD( researcher with Project Zero at Harvard University) argues : kids learn through all their senses and they like to touch and manipulate things".

3-  Students have different learning styles and games can cater to all these styles: auditory, kinaesthetic, tactile, and visual learners.

5- Games enhance students motor skills coordination, an essential element for carrying on functional activities throughout their entire lives.

6- Situated learning (local learning or inside learning) is greatly enhanced through game play.

7- Virtual game environments provide learners with an immersive experience that encompasses frequent opportunities for reflection and collaborative meaning construction.

8- According to Richard Van Eck, Games and play can be effective learning environments not because they are fun but because they are : immersive, require the player to make frequent important decisions; have clear goals, adapt to each player individually; and involve a social network.

9- Their social and experiential natures make out of games ideal activities for developing memory, understanding, and problem solving.

10- Most of popular games develop communities around them. These communities are what James Paul Gee called "affinity space". In these gaming affinity spaces, gamers get to share ideas, use group problem-definition and problem solving, socialize and develop social skills .

11- According to SRI Study released a year ago, games particularly digital games can improve students achievements in areas of Math, Science, engineering, and technology.

I also invite you to check the infographic below to learn more about how games help students learn.





Resources :

• What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy
• Can Digital Games Boos Students Test Score
• The Art and Science of Teaching / Using Games to Enhance Student Achievement
• Hands-on is Minds-on
• Games and Learning

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Great Game-based Learning Tools and Apps for Teachers

May 9, 2014
Immersive environments can be good learning vehicles if constructed and used correctly. Here are a set of virtual worlds that use the latest in game mechanics to deliver instruction in fun and interactive ways. Consider them as a supplement to a classroom or for use with students that respond well to such immersion.

Dora's Great Big World 

This iOS app immerses preschoolers in learning games on topics like letter recognition, early reading, and early counting.

Zondle

Create , play, and share games to support teaching and learning any subject, any level, any language, anywhere.

Minecraft

Minecraft is a game about breaking and placing blocks. At first, people built structures to protect against nocturnal monsters, but as the game grew players worked together to create wonderful, imaginative things.

The Time Tribe 

This web-based, historically accurate, CCSS-aligned, time-travel adventure teaches critical thinking, empathy, and global citizenship.

Wizen World 

Practice CCSS-aligned 3rd to 8th grade math within this web-based virtual world. Contains some cartoon and fantasy violence.

Want more? Check out these collections 
Web: Game-Based Learning Sites, 4th & 5th Grades 

This collection is  curated by education technology consultant Lisha Vuskovich.

Gamification/GBL Tools for My Class 

This one is curated by technology integration specialist Jake Duncan.

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4 Elements of Successful Learning We Can Learn from Online Games

April 24, 2014
In her spectacular TED Talk " Gaming can make a better world" researcher and game developer Dr. Jane McGonigal talked about four important features that make gamers spend a tremendous number of hours playing tirelessly online games. Let me first share with you these interesting statistics Jane mentioned in her talk:

• We spend 3 billion hours weekly playing online games
• 500 million people spend at least an hour a day playing games.

The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10.000 hours playing games by the age of 21. This is an interesting number for two reasons: first 10 thousand and eighty hours is the exact amount of time students spend from  fifth grade to high school graduation if they have perfect attendance.So there is an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning about as much it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about anything else. Malcom Gladwell  theory of success  states that  if we can master 10.000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world.

According to Jane these are the four elements that give games the power to spend thousands of hours playing games and collaboratively solving challenging problems posed in these games. These same elements, I believe. if applied in a learning context would make us better learners.

1- Urgent optimism
This is extreme self motivation. It is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win  is possible and that it is worth trying and trying now.

2-Social Fabric
There is a lot of research that shows that we like people better after we play a game with them even if they beat us badly. The reason is that it takes trust to play a game with someone we trust they will spend time with us, they will play by the same rules, value the same goals, they will stay with the game until it's over. Playing a game together actually build up bonds and trust and cooperation and we  build stronger social relationships as a result.

3- Blissful Productivity
The reason why so many gamers spend several hours  playing games is  because they feel happier working hard than  relaxing or hanging out. It gives them an uplifting sense that they are optimized as human beings to do hard and meaningful work .

4- Epic meaning
Gamers love to be attached to inspiring missions to human planetary scale stories. Here is one bit of trivia that helps put this in perspective: The second biggest wiki in the world after wikipedia is the World of  Warcraft wiki with nearly 80.000 articles and 5 million people use it every month. These people have compiled more information about the World of Warcraft in the internet than any other topic covered in any other wiki in the world. They are building an epic story.They are building an epic knowledge resource about the world of warcraft.

Watch Jane's TED talk to learn more about why gaming can make a better world.

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