FOR ALL THOSE READERS who, like me, have an interest the sales and marketing of games and educational products, here are some must reads:
EricaBiz, writes “It’s time to completely change your Marketing Strategy!“, speaks about the need for a fundamental change in marketing due to the financial crisis.
In terms of targeting your audiences, I have [...]
The American Psychological Association (APA) has been busy lately doing research into how gaming boosts cognitive skills. “A host of studies suggest that video game build cognitive skills. Even a relatively simple tiling puzzle like Tetris has been shown to boost brainpower”, they write. They also comment on experiments that show that laparoscopic surgeons who [...]
The derivative matching game‘, by The MAA Mathematical Sciences Digital Library”, offers one of those maths activities that you think, ‘this is so simple, but effective, why hasn’t this been done before?’ It consists of showing graphs of a few functions, and the graphs of their derivatives, and you have to match them up. Simple, [...]
Learn about Virtual Worlds
It seems as if all the junior youth are into virtual worlds these days. Raph Koster, the video gaming guru, points us to the “2008 Metaverse Tour Video” which is a video tour of almost all the major virtual worlds, whilst LightSpeed offers and excellent summary of points via its “Cartoon Networks [...]
In “Videogames and learning: Individualization, simluation, and complexity”, Scott McLeod talks about three core ideas:
the individualization of learning
the simulation of authentic experiences
intellectual complexity
(Okay, so they may not be easy, but there are 3 of them!). Three notable quotes from each of these ideas are:
the individualisation of learning
Video games are structured so that learners constantly operate [...]
Alex iskold writes about “The Future of Computer Applications: Help me or Entertain me”. I think that this question is right on the ball. If you look at the latest iPhone or Facebook application development craze you realize that the most popular definitely fit into one of these two categories. He says:
These days work and [...]
Jeremy outlines the 6 ways that we use play to learn how to work together. Although, the study was centreed around 2-5 year olds, I think it is quite easy to extrapolate the learnings to the junior youth (those youth, typically at junior high level):
Play is a serious business….
Unoccupied play: the child is relatively stationary [...]
In terms of junior youth education projects worth keeping an eye on, here’s one:
Kiwi Heroes is an upcoming and full-featured MMOG for kids and young teens. It’s complete with character advancement, special powers and abilities, extensive social and community features, and a world full of dynamic solo and group-based adventures and wondrous places to explore.
Scheduled [...]
