From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Will Wright, the video-game designer responsible for some of the best-selling titles of all time, says that video games are better at inspiring students to learn than actually teaching them.

This morning, semiconductor producer AMD announced “AMD Changing the Game,” an education initiative designed to empower youth to learn critical life skills through games with social content. The launch accompanies AMD’s sponsorship and participation at the fifth annual Games for Change festival held June 3 – 4 at Parsons The New School for Design in [...]

17 projects will receive up to $238,000 in funding as part of the first ever Digital Media and Learning Competition funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and administered by HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). While my proposal wasn’t among the less than 2% of submissions awarded funding, [...]

While doing research with Dr. Edward Brantmeier, I ran across this interesting information from Cole and Crawford (2007) in an article called “Building peace through information and communication technologies.” The table below details some of the authors’ main points. Ways of Promoting Peace and Reconciliation through ICTs Examples of ICTs Provide information Internet connectivity Mobile [...]

SimCity Societies, the latest release in the SimCity franchise, is due for release on November 13. The game integrates a social and cultural modeling component. Characteristics of each user-run SimCity is determined by the user through development of six social, cultural, and economic factors: productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge. From EA: Featuring an [...]

Education Futures contributor Brock Dubbels was interviewed in the National Education Association‘s October 2007 issue of NEA Today on the use of games in the classroom. Make sure to read the article, and bookmark Brock’s list of video game resources for educators! Also, click here to read Education Futures posts by Brock on games in [...]

One of the big ideas from 6.0 was that kids are not naturally good at complex games. They often have the time, resources, but they do not always have the guidance of a mentor. Many kids are playing games designed by adults for adults. This is good and bad. Good in that the adult games [...]

Do kids just naturally get it? Are they just good at games, computers, phones, and all things digital? My experience and common sense says no, although I wish it were a general truth. Do kids need to learn about games in school? Yes, if we want to guide them in optimal usage, and maybe learn [...]

What was presented yesterday is how to embody and teach a lesson on Voice. Trying to teach voice sounds pretty boring, especially when you tell them excitedly in your teacher nerd-talk that “you’ll like it, it’s fun! We’ll look at poetry and other fiction and examine tone, emphasis, word choice, syntax, volume, and all the [...]