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Showing posts from June, 2014

Serious Games For U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship Training

Image produced and provided by and RealTime Immersive, Inc. Cubic Advanced Learning Solutions will deliver the presentation Scaling Up — The LCS Experience in Game-Based Training at the upcoming Serious Play Conference , to be held at the University of Southern California on July 22-24, 2014. The speakers will discuss their experiences developing a Serious Game for the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), announced as the largest game-based training effort undertaken to date. The product of this effort shall replace all of the on-the-job training that is normally provided when sailors report aboard ship. The project requires over 10,000 hours of courseware, to be developed over 7 years, for each variant of the ship (LCS1 and LCS2) as well as a third set of courseware (LCS Mission P ackages) to simulate missions such as anti-submarine, surface warfare and mine countermeasures.  The virtual courseware will run on Crytek’s CryEngine 3. Last year, Cubic Advanced Learning

Serious Games As A Choose-Your-Own-Journey From Slavery To Freedom

The Underground Railroad: Journey to Freedom , developed by Muzzy Lane Software for National Geographic Education, is one of the Silver Medal Winners of the 2014 International Serious Play Awards . The Underground Railroad: Journey to Freedom is an online Serious Game (also available as an iOS app) that incorporates 3-D experiences as students make a series of choices that affect their journey from slavery to freedom. Along their journey students encounter challenges and meet key historical figures who provide help and inspiration. “In the game, you are a slave. You belong to a farmer who owns a tobacco plantation on the eastern shore of Maryland. Six long days a week you tend his field. But not for much longer . . .” Played from a first-person perspective, in a choose-your-own-journey style, the game immerses students in the action as they escape from a southern plantation and head North toward freedom. Along the route, students will talk to historical figure

ELA Serious Game Inklings Earns Gold Metal @ 2014 Serious Play Awards

The Serious Games Association announced the winners of the 2014 International Serious Play Awards , which recognize exceptional titles for game-based learning or training in business, education and healthcare. Schell Games earned one of the first place Gold medals for Inklings , an ELA game they developed for Amplify . The other Gold first place titles were: Planet Jockey , Planet Jockey (Business) Gate , Learning Games Lab, New Mexico State University (Education) Change Talk: Childhood Obesity , Kognito (Healthcare) Inklings: Underground is an action game, for iOS and Android, in which players advance by digging through a series of caves, purifying “corrupt” soil by learning and using morphemes to fix broken words and sentences. The purpose of Inklings is to teach middle school children in grades 6 through 8 the basics of morphology. Essentially, the game educates students on prefixes and suffixes in relation to root words. In the game, the player

Three New Reports Highlight Serious Games in Education

Three recently released reports stress the need to embrace online and digital games as ways to engage students, personalize learning and gauge student success. Learner at the Center of a Networked World Report The report Learner at the Center of a Networked World , produced by the Aspen Institute Task Force on Learning and the Internet and released on June 17, is a cross-sector, cross-partisan report that calls for rethinking learning systems that are currently too bound by time, place and old ways of doing business. The report shifts the traditional focus from one institution, the school, to a focus on the learner and all the places where the learner can advance academically and pursue his or her interests. Games and Learning, in the article The Game Developer’s Guide to the New Aspen Institute Education Report , pulls a few areas that game developers may want to pay special attention to if they are developing educational products.  NMC Horizon Report- 2014 K-12 Ed

Serious Games For Subsurface Special Operations Training

The crew at RealTime Immersive Inc.  (rebranded to Mass Virtual)is working on a Serious Game for Subsurface Special Operations using Virtual Attain™ CryENGINE® .  Virtual Attain is a CryENGINE® powered solution inspired by efforts inside the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command. Virtual Attain is designed to be used by soldiers who have previously received training, such as patrol operations, casualty evacuation, call for fire, egress, and special operation tactics. Virtual Attain’s use of robust review features allows players to make critical decisions during high-pressure, time-limited situations. Students can enhance their situational awareness in hostile environments by taking individual skills previously learned from real world environments and putting them into practice in a simulated team environment. About RealTime Immersive RealTime Immersive is a simulation and Serious Games company that leverages on the market demand for new methods of ef

Mathbreakers: Serious Games Bridge The Gap Between Learning And Play

Mathbreakers Serious Games half-way on Kickstarter The Serious Game Mathbreakers , currently “half-way” on Kickstarter , aims to bridge the gap between learning and play as a 3D math adventure for kids, full of cool stuff like negative monsters, castles and a fraction sword that chops numbers in half!  Mathbreakers proposition of “a modular math playground where numbers come to life” has professors and students lined up at Stanford University and Bristol University, who are excited about validating the game's pedagogical value through academic research. Among the advisors are math educator Federico Chialvo at the  Synapse School  and  Dr. Jo Boaler , professor and math education specialist at the  Center for Education Research at Stanford . Prototyping More Advanced Topics The Mathbreakers game environment has tons of potential for fostering exploration of mathematics. For the past year the team has focused on educating kids in grades 2-5 by making ne

Info-Sentinel Is The 2014 European Serious Games Awards Winner

Via: GALA – Network Of Excellence For Serious Games Info-Sentinel , created by Getzem Secure, is the winner of the Best Learning Game at the 2014 European Serious Games Awards aimed to celebrate the best works on games for learning in Europe. Organized by GALA (the European Network of Excellence dedicated to research on Serious Games) and by the Serious Games Society (a scientific community at international level for shaping future research in the field), the awards recognize the Best Learning Game (1st place), the Best Learning Game (2nd place) and the Best Student Academic Paper, based on the evaluation of experts from the GALA network. The European Serious Game Awards ceremony will take place on Thursday July 3, during the gala dinner of the Games and Learning Alliance (GALA) Conference to be held in Bucharest, Romania. Established in 2011 in Paris, Getzem is a leading provider of security awareness solutions. They create diverse interactive apps to teach secur

Outcasted Is The Winner Of Best Student Serious Game at G4CE

Outcasted is the winner of best student’s game Games for Change Europe (G4CE) Festival , being held on June 15-17 at the CNAM Museum, in Paris. In a joint project of Games for Change Europe, Autodesk and Unity Technologies, students from all over the world were challenged to create Serious Games that help promote social change for the better by engaging players in important social, ecological and humanitarian efforts. Within the course of one year, 96 student teams from 13 countries submitted concepts and prototypes, with nine shortlisted games competing for the award. Selected by a renowned jury, composed by Noah Falstein, Brenda Romero and Eric Zimmerman, among others, the winning team was announced yesterday, June 15, at the first Games for Change Europe Award Ceremony. Developed by the Köln International School of Design (KISD) and the Cologne Game Lab , institutions of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (CUAS) , Outcasted is a stand-alone first-person-si

Consumers To Fuel Demand For Mobile Educational Serious Games

I n North America the growth rate for mobile game-based learning is more than double than for all types of mobile learning combined  Via:  Ambient Insight LLC The revenues for Mobile Educational Serious Games in North America reached $227.9 million in 2013, according to a new report by Ambient Insight called the "2013-2018 North America Mobile Edugame Market." The five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) is 12.5% and revenues shall spike to $410.27 million by 2018. Consumers are by far the major buyers of mobile edugame digital content in Canada and the US and they will continue to dominate throughout the forecast period. The majority of consumer purchases fall into the two ends of the age spectrum: math and language learning for young children (targeting parents through a B2C model) and brain trainers and brain fitness apps for elders. Among the secondary findings are a) Top “selling” edugames are for young children; the number of edugames that offer

Serious Games Guide Surgeons Through Complex Operations

Via:  Touch Surgery WIRED hosted its first Health conference on the 29th of April at the Royal College of General Practitioners in London. Attending the event were over 300 scientists, entrepreneurs and medical pioneers at the core of the health-tech interface. Touch Surgery , the Serious Game that is changing the way that surgeons learn to operate was featured on the startup stage amongst some other apps. As reported by The Almost Doctor’s Channel  via Practice Surgery On the Go, “ Touch Surgery may be the new best app for med students - especially those who want to pursue a surgical field. Even if you aren’t gunning to become a surgeon, the app is actually fun and it’s free”. Developed by Kinosis for iOS and Android , the 3D Serious Game walks players through several common surgical procedures, using a process called Cognitive Task Simulation to break each operation down into fundamental steps and decision-points.  Cognitive Task Simulation is a new devel

Simulia: Serious Games Inspiring Hope For The Future Of Cardiovascular Medicine

Inspiring Hope  Via:  ghOst Productions – 3D Medical Animation Studio Simulia - The Living Heart Project   Simulia , is a division of Dassault Systèmes that makes accurate, realistic simulation an integral business practice to improve product performance and reduce the number of required physical prototypes. Ghost Productions  is a 3D medical animation studio that specializes in surgeon and patient education. Realizing that new medical breakthroughs are made every day, Ghost Productions  uses a wide array of expertise and technology to transform medical discoveries into a breath-taking visual experience. Ghost Productions has recently partnered with Simulia in a new project that explains to cardiologists how running extremely precise simulations on their patient's hearts can contribute to significantly better diagnostics.   The Living Heart project , launched in January 2014, is a transnational research initiative to revolutionize cardiovascular science throu

Kickstarter Funded Serious Games: Mathbreakers Campaign Just Launched!

Via: Kickstarter - Mathbreakers! A 3-D Math Exploration Game Imaginary Number Co., the Mountain View startup for Educational Serious Games, has started a  Kickstarter campaign  to raise $42,000 to make Mathbreakers a part of math curriculum everywhere. The campaign begins on June 5 and ends on July 5. Mathbreakers is a revolutionary approach to grade-school mathematics that allows students to explore a rich 3-D environment where  everything is made of numbers. Players can pick them up, chop them in half, and throw them around. The basic rule of Mathbreakers is that when two numbers touch, they add together and combine. Based on this simple mechanic, there are a host of challenges to overcome. Mathbreakers empowers kids to take control of their own math learning experience. Players are encouraged to experiment and explore the world of numbers around them, without having to worry about making mistakes or getting the “correct” answers right off the bat. Mathematic