GameAccessibility site launches

The AbleGamers Foundation, a West Virginia charity dedicated to information and lobbying related to disabled gamers, has launched a new site called GameAccessibility. It’s a portal for developers and researchers to share thoughts about making all games more accessible, with news updates, and is well worth a look or even signing up to get involved.

The Winter House: an interactive short story

As part of their Story campaign, Booktrust have commissioned The Winter House by Naomi Alderman. It’s a spooky interactive short story set at the turn of the last century, and it includes game mechanics in order to progress the story. The text elements fade and bounce, mirroring the actions described, and hyperlinks and point-and-click hotspots [...]

Handheld species identification with WildKey

WildKnowlege produce a range of software tools allowing learners to create and share images, forms and databases on mobile devices such as PC, iPhone and Nintendo DS. The suite of tools include WildKey, an ambitious branching database tool that provides pupils with simple prompts allowing them to categorise flora and fauna ‘in the field’. The [...]

CANVAS: a virtual world for pupil artwork

Learning and Teaching Scotland’s educational games initiative Consolarium has announced CANVAS, a virtual world allowing local authorities to display pupils’ art. Based on the OpenSim application and created by Aberdeen-based company Second Places, CANVAS (Children’s Art at the National Virtual Arena of Scotland) has the appearance of Second Life while being hosted on LTS servers, [...]

Silent Conversation – text platformer

Gregory Weir of Ludus Novus has released a game called Silent Conversation on Armor Games. The game involves guiding a letter ‘I’ avatar to move over the words in extracts from poetry and prose, including William Carlos Williams and H P Lovecraft. The typography (Silent Conversation is as much a lovingly typeset treatment of fiction [...]

Kodu game creator on Xbox Live

Microsoft Research’s Kodu on Xbox 360 allows users to create their own games using a visual programming interface. Through a series of ‘if…then’ commands it’s possible to create complex interactions such as ‘if player presses R trigger then unicycle jumps and changes to random colour’. While the resultant games are likely to be small in [...]

Nintendo DS Classroom unveiled for Japan

Today Nintendo and Sharp System Products unveiled DS Classroom, allowing DS consoles to be linked to a central computer and used with specialised educational software. Known as “Nintendo DS Kyoushitsu” in its native Japanese, the new system pairs up the DS with a PC. Teachers make use of software on the PC to interact via [...]

PSP Go to result in cheaper PSPs for schools?

Rumours of Sony’s PSP Go console appear to have been confirmed. The hardware features slide-out controls and digital-only distribution (i.e. no UMD slot) and is apparently far lighter than previous PSP iterations. Unlike Nintendo’s new DSi console, there appear to be no new features that would benefit classroom use directly. However, the rumoured Autumn release [...]

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. [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

World Digital Library: downloadable resources for teachers

The recently-launched World Digital Library is a huge collection of free primary material aiming to promote international and intercultural understanding. The site is operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress, and as well as going some way to expanding non-English and non-western content on the Internet, it will also provide a great [...]