I recently watched two TEDTalks. The first was titled ‘Why tech needs the humanities’ (2017) and was presented by Eric Berridge, the cofounder of BlueWolf, an IBM company. The second was ‘Teach arts and sciences together’ (2002) presented by Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut. While neither are exclusively […]
games and education
15 posts
Immediately after finals last week, in preparation for traveling down South to meet my partner’s parents, cousins, sister, aunts, uncles (basically all of Texas), I began a hunt for games I could play on my iPad and on Steam – especially since bringing my Xbox One with me wasn’t exactly […]
As I launch a new game studies program, I am becoming keenly aware of issues that crop up when you bring games and concepts from game studies into an undergraduate classroom. When I was a graduate student, surrounded by professors and graduate students, I almost never had to argue about […]
Episode 110: Back to School Special: Learning With, Through, and Around Games (Right click and save as to download, or find us on iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn). With school starting recently for all of us, we’ve been thinking a lot about games as educational spaces. In this episode we talk about lots […]
Recently I was asked by a group of graduate students (not my own) why I do games research. It’s a question that I get frequently and the answer is not usually what people expect. Or at least not fully so. They expect me to tell them how I see my […]
Since I’ve been going to lots of talks in my department that focus on people and their teaching philosophies (gotta love job search time) it’s been forcing me to think more about what it would look like if I gave a talk about about my own pedagogical teaching practices (don’t […]
It’s no secret that I have a real interest in games for educational purposes. And this interest extends to games that might be both fun and educational to my own 6 year old. So when I got the chance to review The Counting Kingdom by Little Worlds Interactive for iOS […]
As most of you know, I am on sabbatical this semester and working on a new games and learning project. As always it is difficult to force myself to sit down and write (in a scholarly way) what it is that I find myself arguing here, at conferences, and anywhere […]
I spend a lot of time listening to other gaming podcasts and a bit less time watching video podcasts about games. A lot of the folks that I watch and listen to have a lot in common with me older gamers (Gamers with Jobs), female gamers (Ladies of Leet), gamers […]
Episode 38: Teacher, There’s a Game in My Classroom!: Games and Learning (“Save As” to download or head over to iTunes to subscribe) This week we talk about games and education in like of some new moves in the field from the likes of EA, Valve, and the White House. […]
Gaming is a huge part of both the academic and leisure sides of my life. I have been playing video games as a leisure activity for more than 30 years so the overlap into other areas of my life are both inevitable and undeniable. Lately I have been looking at […]
Sometimes things stick with you for a reason…bits of a comedy show, a disturbing news story, and the hundreds of hours that you spend playing farming/social simulations on a handheld device. And sometimes those things come together in a perfect storm that allow you to write a post like the […]
So, I wanna get a bit more serious than usual for a second here. There have been a number of posts about games and education floating around in my head and in various states of completion digitally for a while now. Perhaps it’s time they come to light. Rather than […]
In our last podcast we talked about just what zombies mean in a larger cultural context. A new government publication brought it back to light for me this week so I thought I’d take a minute to throw out a few final ideas before some strange dude comes and eats […]
So I’m reading this book called Finite and Infinite Play by James P. Carse, a religion professor. His take on play has inspired some interesting possibilities that I can see being very useful in the current debate about gaming and education. First, and he makes this very clear, “whoever […]