Platform: Web Games Subject: Civics Grade Level: 4th grade and up Focus: Awareness, Learning
Introduction: iCivics is a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in United States democracy. iCivics does a nice job of integrating instruction through gameplay and promotes civic awareness through a variety of interactions. The games cover a wide range of topics such as, “Citizenship and Participation”, “The Constitution and Bill of Rights”, “Budgeting”, “Foreign Policy & National Defense”, “Separation of Powers”, and all three branches of government (Legislative, Executive and Judicial). Read More
Overview: For students looking to perfect their utility of basic math skills while blasting robots, look no further than PEMDAS Blaster. A well designed drill game, Blaster assumes prior knowledge and seeks to sharpen response time to basic math operations. Speed is paramount as evil robots come toward you with the intent to harm. The only way to destroy them is to solve each of their “access codes” (math problems). PEMDAS Blaster has a variety of engaging rewards that allow you to upgrade your weapons, throw grenades, and put up road blocks. The varied reward structure leads to prolonged engagement even for repetitive play. Read More
Santa Monica math teacher, Eric Marcos, has been teaching 6th grade students how to develop and produce math educational videos to be shared online. With the use of a Tablet PC and the screen recording software, Camstasia Studio, Eric Marcos’ students create quick 1-3 minute training videos that cover 6th grade math concepts.
This student video from 2010 teaches kids how to calculate circumference:
Notice all of the interactive features that make the video look and feel like a more advanced version of your standard classroom whiteboard: drawing lines to emphasize sections of the shape, writing out the problem, and highlighting key text and visuals.
This essay argues that these are critical questions to game studies, and educational studies, particularly work in the learning sciences, and offers some important practical and theoretical traditions that games studies can draw upon as it matures as a field. link
This is a fantastic video. I love watching the kids talk about their experiences.
This is from g8four, a learning, design, and technology firm, in Birmingham, Alabama.
- Lucien
With the 2008 purchase of 15,000 XO laptops from One Laptop Per Child, Birmingham, Alabama has poised itself for tremendous educational opportunities. Unlike some school reform initiatives, this effort by the mayor requires a level of community involvement and renewed educational understanding that is unparalleled.
Abstract: In this chapter, we consider the capabilities video games offer to educators who seek to foster prosocial development using three popular frameworks: moral education, character education, and care ethics. – we suggest that video games are unique from these other media in the multiple levers through which they can influence the worldview, values, and behaviors of players.
Excerpt:“To be effective as teaching tools, exhibits need to be highly intrinsically motivating at every step of an interaction in order to sustain involvement by an audience who views their visit primarily as a leisure activity. Given these challenges, it is vital to support the design process with a strong program of research and evaluation.”
SMALLab at Arizona State University supports situated and embodied learning by empowering the physical body to function as an expressive interface.
For example, working in the Spring Sling scenario, students are immersed in a complex physics simulation that involves multiple sensory inputs to engage student attention. They can hear the sound of a spring picking up speed, see projected bodies moving across the floor, feel a physical ball in their own hands and integrate how the projected ball moves in accordance with their own body movements to construct a robust conceptual model of the entire system.
Quote by Dr. Tyler Tingly: “The Harkness Table fosters a sense of collaboration and encouragement that continues when class is over. Students tell me they learn just as much from each other after class as they do in class. “It’s incredible how much you can learn when you’re together instead of apart,” a student said to me. Imagine school like that.”
“The way to fire children’s enthusiasm for education is not to get them learning lists of facts, but to think like someone who learns for a living” and “scrap tests – judge the schools by the number of university graduates instead”, says education guru Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High in San Diego.
Larry Rosenstock steers a group of student-centered schools in San Diego; High Tech High, a chain of nine charter schools … set up nine years ago by a coalition of business leaders and educators in the Californian city. Among its supporters is the charity set up by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his wife Melinda.
Rosenstock says: “The problem with pedagogy, in US high schools at least, is that, if you get kids to memorise 3,000 biological words, you make them think that they do not want to be a biologist. “But if you get them to behave like a biologist, or behave like a photographer, or a journalist, or a mathematician, that changes everything.”
Rosenstock said adult learning was also key. Teachers at High School High spend the first hour of every day on professional development. He said this work was more important than any set of formal qualifications the teachers might have.
He added that he was against the idea of “standardization” in education: setting central goals for schools and then using accountability to check they were being achieved.
GameDesk is a 501(c)3 nonprofit research and outreach organization that seeks to reshape models for learning through game-play and game development.
The organization looks to help close the achievement gap and engage students to learn core STEM curriculum. It develops project-based learning with a strong focus on purpose, ownership, and personal value.
The organization (originally developed out of research and support at the University of Southern California's IMSC) has now been in development, practice, and/or evaluation for over two years in various schools in the Los Angeles area.
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Introduction: iCivics is a web-based education project designed to teach students civics and inspire them to be active participants in United States democracy. iCivics does a nice job of integrating instruction through gameplay and promotes civic awareness through a variety of interactions. The games cover a wide range of topics such as, “Citizenship and Participation”, “The Constitution and Bill of Rights”, “Budgeting”, “Foreign Policy & National Defense”, “Separation of Powers”, and all three branches of government (Legislative, Executive and Judicial). Read More
Link to 
An interesting paper on museum learning at the San Francisco Exploritorium: 
SMALLab at Arizona State University supports situated and embodied learning by empowering the physical body to function as an expressive interface.
Quote by Dr. Tyler Tingly: 
“The way to fire children’s enthusiasm for education is not to get them learning lists of facts, but to think like someone who learns for a living” and “scrap tests – judge the schools by the number of university graduates instead”, says education guru Larry Rosenstock of High Tech High in San Diego.
We're powered by Podio- a new type of