I'm asking you, educators. EVOKE sounded amazing, when I heard it described by game designer Jane McGonigal on NPR's Science Friday the other day. The goal of this free social game is to "help empower people all over the world to develop creative solutions to urgent social problems" – beyond "mere" civic engagement to social problem-solving. Of course EVOKE isn't the only social-media teaching … [Read more...] about Can this be played in school? Please?
Quest to Learn
Microsoft Research is literally creating code kids can play with. It's called Kodu – a play on the word "code" – and it's a programming language for creating games on Xbox that's "designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone," Microsoft says on its Web page about it. You design with a game controller (and my 12-year-old thought he was going to have to learn game design in … [Read more...] about Turning young players into game designers
You know how middle and secondary school (probably in most countries) divide students' days into subjects? Well, there's a new public school in New York City that divides the schoolday into four 90-minute blocks devoted to the study of “domains,” The Economist reports. They're called things like "Codeworlds (a combination of mathematics and English), Being, Space and Place (English and social … [Read more...] about From ‘chalk ‘n’ talk’ to learning by doing