Co-op games to promote speaking and learning skills

With Jim Rose’s review of the UK primary curriculum placing particular emphasis on speaking and listening skills, I’ve been thinking about games that promote communication. Of course, most games can be played with contributions from other people and there are plenty of multiplayer competitive games. However, my girlfriend and I have developed an obsession with [...]

1066 Flash game from Channel 4

Channel 4 has produced a 1066 Flash game to complement its TV drama of the same name (discovered via Wonderland). Developed by Preloaded, the game can be played as a singleplayer campaign or against online opponents. The interface is impressively complex, allowing the player to command each Viking unit, with added authentic taunts and insults. [...]

Google Earth as game engine

Ships is a serious application in which you take control of a variety of barges, container ships and cruise liners, and drive them around the world. The application is built around the Google Earth browser plugin and features an onscreen user interface added to the usual Google Earth view. If you have the Google Earth [...]

Word clouds from Wordle

Wordle is a neat tool allowing you to create word clouds from copy-pasted text from any source or even whole websites (as in the example above, covering SeriousGamePlan’s text to date).  While you can print the word cloud or link to it online, currently the only way of saving the image is to take a [...]

Mobile phones in learning

There’s a handy page of links over at Teachnet to websites allowing constructive use of mobile phones in learning contexts. This includes resources to share cameraphone images, including the ability to upload to blogs directly from the phone. There are also links to resources such as TextTheMob, allowing instant display of survey results and messages [...]

Learning and Teaching Scotland videos on iTunes

iTunes U is part of the iTunes store featuring lectures and audiobooks from universities and museums, all available for free. Learning and Teaching Scotland, in typically trailblazing fashion, are leading the charge to add videos aimed at teachers developing and supporting 3-18 education and the new Scottish Primary curriculum, ‘Curriculum for Excellence’. While not games-based, [...]

US Army uses videogames to recruit

Reuters gives a detailed report on the US Army Experience Center, a recruitment center in a Philadephia shopping mall featuring 60 PCs and 19 Xbox 360 consoles that allows potential recruits to simulate battle conditions: The Philadelphia center lures recruits with a separate room for prospective soldiers to “fire” from a real Humvee on enemy [...]

Alice Taylor on commissioning educational games

Alice Taylor at Wonderland has posted some thoughts about her role at Channel 4, where she commissions educational content aimed at UK teenagers. Most of her remit – and the aspect I’ve heard her speak about at BETT and Games Based Learning conferences – involves online games, although in her post she refers to comics, [...]