Johnny Chung Lee at Carnegie Mellon University created a couple innovative uses for the relatively cheap Nintendo Wii Remote. Most impressively, by combining a Wiimote, an LCD projector, and a little C# programming, he created a low-cost, multi-touch whiteboard system: More (including videos of other cool stuff you can do with your Wii) at his [...]

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 [...]

Games as Expert Systems It seems like common sense to assume that the best way to learn something is to work one-on-one with an expert. Unfortunately, many of these experts are busy using their expertise in important projects at the Louvre, saving lives, winning Nobel prizes, and putting out fires—and sometimes a great expert is [...]

Twenty years ago, playing games over a distance might have meant that you played turn-taking games like chess over email, and you were cutting edge. I remember people playing chess through snail mail! You would make your move and wait for a reply. What is happening now is taking place in real-time in virtual environments [...]

To do is to be To be is to do So Do We? It is just good teaching Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn. Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is [...]

Brock Dubbels, a Ph.D. candidate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota is joining Education Futures for the next week or so as a guest blogger. Brock brings nearly two decades of experience in education and instructional design, exploring new technologies for assessment, delivering content, creating engagement with learners, and investigating ways people [...]

Cathy Zemke forwarded this along from Brock Dubbels on a CEHD mailing list: In a recent story on WCCO, Jason DeRusha reported on curriculum that Brock Dubbels, a graduate student in Curriculum and Instruction, created for his classroom at Northeast Middle School in Minneapolis using video games to meet state standards in reading and literature. [...]

This is a great article! Online education often provides too much explicit knowledge and too little tacit knowledge and social interaction. In this article, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas identify an avenue for tacit knowledge production in virtual settings. As virtual reality is becoming more-and-more preferred over the real world, perhaps the “Leapfrog U” [...]