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Showing posts from March, 2011

STEM Serious Games Challenge - Winners Announced

  This screen shot shows Shireen Zaineb’s award-winning science game Discover  U.S. Chief Technology Officer Announces Winners of the First Annual National STEM Serious Games Challenge NEW YORK, NY and WASHINGTON, DC--(Marketwire - March 30, 2011) - Aneesh Chopra, United States Chief Technology Officer, announced today the winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge , a competition to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) learning by tapping into the natural passion of youth for playing and making video games, at the Newseum in Washington, DC.   The first year of the Challenge featured competitions for students and developers. Twelve students from across the U.S. in grades 5-8 were selected as winners of the Youth Prize for their original game designs. In the Developer Prize category, for emerging and experienced game developers, the science themed game You Make Me Sick! was awarded the Grand Prize and a collection of math games titl

Mission Expedition: Serious Games Recreating The Experience Of Nat Geo's Documentaries

A stop-motion building of the miniature sets National Geographic, at its core, is dedicated to going out into the world and uncovering amazing new things. It's about putting those new things into a context that helps us better understand our planet, makes us amazed, and stokes our senses of awe and wonderment at the sheer awesomeness of the world we inhabit. Every year when they put on Expedition Week, all of those things are in the very DNA of the documentaries that they air. This year, in building out the Expedition Week website, they wanted to come up with an experience that would bring alive for visitors the joy of exploring some tiny corner of the real-world, and recreate the excitement of finding something no one else has found before. The result is Mission Expedition! Serious Game. Take a turn at the helm of a robotic camera-train and drive it through a miniature world that represents the environments from several Expedition Week documentaries. Find tiny artifac

First-Ever Serious Play Conference Covers Most Of Serious Games Taxonomy

Serious Play Conference Aims Program at Corporate, Military, Education, Healthcare Decision-Makers, Developers for Serious Games; DigiPen to Host The first-ever Serious Play Conference will take place in Seattle, Aug 22-25, at the DigiPen Institute of Technology , one of the top game development institutions in the United States. Serious Play will be attended by h eads of corporate, military and healthcare programs using Serious Games for mission-critical training, s enior educators, t op simulation and education developers, and s trategic vendors providing hardware, software and applications for the serious games sector. The conference will also include the following tracks: • Education/home learning • Government training/military simulations • Health/medical training • Business/corporate training • Consumer/games for good Here is the full press release. SEATTLE -- March 29, 2011 – Heads of corporate, military and health care programs using Serious Games

Disruptive Innovation in K-12 Education: Serious Games Across The Board

Via: User Generated Education – More Disruption of Education + Accredited Online Colleges - 10 Latest Trends in K-12 Education User Generated Education has just posted an article quoting Ronald A. Wolk, in Education Week on 3/7/11. Wolk asks “How do we explain that nearly 30 years of unprecedented effort and enormous expenditures has not improved student performance, reduced the dropout rate, or closed the achievement gap?” “More standardization is not what our schools need. As Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen states in his book Disrupting Class , “only an administrator suffering from virulent masochism would attempt to teach each student in the way his or her brain is wired to learn within this monolithic batch system”. The future is now. Clay Christensen's groundbreaking bestselling work in education now updated and expanded, includes a new chapter on Christensen's seminal "Jobs to Be Done" theory applied to education. Disrupting

Serious Games For Diplomacy In Action

Via:  TechAtState – Serious Games, May 27-28 @ the Newseum Tech@State connects tech innovators and those interested in diplomacy to enable 21st century statecraft by improving education, health and welfare of the world's population. Tech@State was created by the U.S. State Department's Office of eDiplomacy . Founded in 2003, the Office is part of the Bureau of Information Resource Management, combining the expertise and experience of Foreign and Civil Service Officers and contract professionals. The Office of eDiplomacy is divided into two branches: the Diplomatic Innovation Division and the Customer Liaison Division. Formed in response to recommendations from the Overseas Presence Advisory Panel that the State Department improve its ability to communicate and share knowledge, the Diplomatic Innovation Division (DID) hosts a variety of platforms that equip State Department employees with innovative tools for collaboration, an initiative that closely aligns with Se

Serious Games For Healthcare Design Beyond the Hospital

Dr. Yan Chow, a pediatrician with Kaiser, demonstrates a videoconferencing system that would allow doctors to speak with patients in their homes. Last year, Kaiser Permanente delivered 5 million visits via videoconference (Skype), telephone, and email. Via: Interactive Multimedia Technology – Healthcare Design Gets Closer to Serious Games As reported by Lynn Marentette today on her blog, the article For the Future of Health Care Design, Look Beyond the Hospital at http://www.fastcodesign.com/ is a must-read for anyone thinking about developing applications for healthcare professionals, clinics, hospitals, patients, etc. In her opinion, it is very important to look at the "Big Picture", especially for techies who are finding themselves taking on responsibilities related to information architecture in this field. Serious Games Shifting Healthcare From A “Point Of Service” Clinical Model To An Ongoing Dialogue Between Patients And Their Providers   The authors

Nintendo New Release Raises Some Serious Debates On 3D Games

Via: The Associated Press – 3DS Can Reveal Vision Problems Promising to usher in a new era in 3D entertainment, Nintendo’s glasses-free handheld 3DS will go on sale on March 27 in the U.S. for $250. That's the same price that the revolutionary Wii console cost when it went on sale in 2006. Nintendo Co. said 3D games on its highly anticipated new handheld console could harm the eyesight of children aged 6 or younger, warning of possible ill effects from a technology on which many companies are betting big. Nintendo said some specialists believe that "there is a possibility that 3D images which send different images to the left and right eye could affect the development of vision in small children." 3D Depth Slider A built-in 3D Depth Slider allows you to immediately adjust the intensity of the 3D settings on the Nintendo 3DS system to your liking. The 3D effect can also be turned down completely—all Nintendo 3DS games and applications can be played in 2D

LudoMedic: Serious Games For Kids Hospitalization

Via: LudoMedic – Serious Games For Health Platform, Release Date -December 2011 LudoMedic is a "Serious Games" Platform, whose main theme is the hospitalization of 6-14 year old children. Developed by CCCP Studio, LudoMedic, formerly called MediKids, will host a number of Serious Games for Health intended for kids, parents and healthcare professionals. The platform consists of a game engine, a dialog engine with integrated speech synthesis, especially conceived for children who cannot read yet; three independent healthcare pathways: MRI, pediatric surgery and chemotherapy; a collection of mini-games and educational activities specific for each pathway; and a community website providing free modules available to the public. LudoMedic has three complementary objectives: simulate children’s healthcare when hospitalized; inform the parents about the healthcare processes involving their children and allow physicians to better communicate with their patients.  

Serious Games As Collaborative Publishing: Carbon Zero Just $2 K From Threshold

Join Alex Steffen in an experiment in collaborative publishing! Following my recent post Serious Games As Collaborative Publishing: Join Alex Steffen's Carbon Zero @ Kickstarter, here is update #1 from Alex Steffen: Friends-- Thank you so much for your support, encouragement and enthusiasm. It's been great hearing from you, getting your ideas, reading your blog posts and tweets. This has been an absolutely wonderful experience. Thank you. And it's working! Our community-funded ebook Carbon Zero: A Short Tour of Your City's Future is now just $2,549 away from hitting threshold goal of $10,000. If we can go over $10K, we're making a book. That could happen today! It would be a great statement to hit the baseline funding in less than a week (and might create some sponsorship opportunities, allowing us to do an even cooler project - more on that soon): Thank you for joining OPEN and I in this experiment. I appreciate it deeply. I don't th

East Coast Game Conference 2011 Includes Serious Games And Gamification

The Triangle Game Conference will be returning for its third edition in 2011 as the East Coast Game Conference, to be held on April 13 th -14 th at the Raleigh Convention Center. The Triangle Game Conference began in 2008 and is now expanding to engage and connect professionals along the entire east coast RALEIGH, N.C., Mar. 22, 2011 — The East Coast Game Conference (ECGC) has announced its final line-up of technical tracks and speakers for a dynamic learning exchange on market innovation, game development trends and what’s on the horizon for the video game industry. Under the theme, Engage and Connect , attendees will have the opportunity to engage with seven extensive tracks comprised of panels, lectures and discussions with industry talent from across the nation and around the world. New this year, each track is geared toward a specific industry audience, whether that is technologists and artists developing games, individuals working with advanced learning technologie