LEGO is often used in educational setting, particularly K-12 and in engineering. I have used LEGO in my college courses to teach basic instruction writing and in larger iterative design and usability projects. But, I was surprised to learn recently that Serious LEGO is also being used in corporate training. […]
Games and Education
87 posts
This post is a write-up of a talk I gave recently at the Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, WI. Enjoy! The GamerGate explosion in 2014 had far reaching implications that spidered across many areas: industry workplace practices, how gaming communities function, and how people view video games and gamers. Scholars have […]
In the last month or so there has been lots of discussion going on about and around the confederate flag here in the United States. Ultimately, the flag has been removed from most state government buildings and is no longer being sold in a number of big box and online […]
I spent most of last week at an annual academic games conference and have spent a lot of time processing and digesting what went on there. The thing that I love about these conferences is that I get to sit and talk (and drink beer) with other academics who often […]
I have always been a huge advocate of ethical reflection and thoughtfulness in the classroom. I believe that regardless of what you teach about or what you teach with, you should be cognizant of the possible ramifications for your students. For example, I gave a talk in 2011 about how […]
It’s early in the morning and I have yet to have coffee, but I promise I’m not crazy. I know that I have never been a fan of gamification (and I can promise that this isn’t a post about gamification itself, though we’ve done that a lot in the past) […]
Joseph Garrett is a Minecraft playing star. His alter ego, a mischievous orange and white feline named Stampy Cat, has over 5.6 million subscribers (at the time of this posting) on his family oriented YouTube channel. The seasoned YouTuber caters to his younger audience by utilizing humorous sound effects and […]
When I tell people I teach game design, they often immediately assume I do programming. And yes, I do some of that, but as anyone that teaches game design will tell you, it’s much more than that. Increasingly I think of my job as advocating for a compositional approach to […]
This week the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has decided that once a publisher stops supporting a game doing anything to restore it to functionality is the equivalent of hacking or piracy. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has responded by asking the U.S. Copyright Office to make special exceptions for museums, […]
This week, over 3,000 academics gathered in sunny, warm Tampa, Florida to talk about writing and language and consume every bit of coffee the unprepared Mariott hotel had to offer. It was the 66th meeting of the Conference of College Composition and Communication (affectionately known as Cs), a hub for […]
Somebody once told me that if I had put as much effort into my school work as I did with videogames, I would have been a straight A student. I shrugged my teenage shoulders and rolled my teenage eyes but deep down that comment hurt. I knew I was smart […]
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 […]
For years we have been talking about learning to write code through game play with things like Gamestar Mechanic and Double Fine’s Hack and Slash (which requires you to change the code of the game’s assets in order to win), but the recent attention that folks like YouTuber SethBling has gotten […]
For years I have given folks that party line that I don’t “teach” writing, but rather that I facilitate writing. And, of course, it’s true even if it does sound damned pretentious. You really can’t teach someone how to write. You can model it for them and give them feedback, […]
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 […]
When the New York Times ran the piece on the comeback of board games last week I had several different people send my the link via email. The first thing I thought was “Wow, people might actually know what I do” the second thing was “Wow, why is this just […]