I am excited to be giving a talk today with Nina Walia as part of Games for Learning: Research and Design Innovation at NYU. It’s a quick talk, but I wanted to make sure those interested could take a look at our slides and dig into some of the links to games from our presentation.
Operation Resilient Planet, Mentioned on Slide 4: It is a big, 6 hr game. We also allow teachers to pick small 20-25 min experiences from the game to use in classrooms. Transform-It and Energy City: Mentioned on slide 5: Free browser based flash games that provide a range of different challenges. Both have something you can do in 20 minutes in a class but provide hours of play later at home. Coaster Creator and Eco Defenders. Mentioned on Slide 6: Both of these games provide spaces for direct classroom objectives, but also provide deeper experiences for players to try to best their own scores.
Here is an example of how videos model practices for classroom teachers. Mentioned in Slide 10:
You can log into the Jason Mission Center to browse some of these supporting classroom materials. Mentioned in Slide 11.
…if you happened to be at a huge-land-grant institution in the past 7 years or so, you’ve heard some mutterings about a very secret situation. Science graduate students… highly trained, highly skilled, highly smart and highly unable to find a good job. The kind of job they were promised they’d have if only, if only, they were really smart, studied hard, eschewed the typical pleasures of high school and college life to embrace the glamorous, secure life of a scientists. This was whispered about on campuses and in publications directed at scientists.
Image from Retrotyoys.com
Weird huh? How did this happen? Are we graduating incompetent people? Hardly. But somehow, we keep hearing from politicians, educations, and folks in the business community that we need scientists and engineers. There is a dearth of talent. We need to improve science education! We need to inspire kids!
Looks like the main stream message is finally starting to catch up the the reality: We don’t have jobs for all our scientists. Got that? We can stop the mea culpa about not having enough scientists. We have too many, and we can’t give these people the jobs they’ve been preparing for for 10-14 years.
This doesn’t diminish the role of science education by a long shot, but it should make us reconsider what science education is for and why it is important. The key focus should be science literacy for citizens. There is of course, nothing new about this, but it is a good time to reflect on our priorities. Do we need another unemployed nuclear scientsits, or do we want to have an informed citizenry that avoids ghosts, gouls, and the alignment of stars in making policy decisions?
Several months ago I had been researching geology games to inspire me with some ideas for our upcoming curriculum over we are working on. Searching for free educational games online is a painful process (but I’m working on it….more on that later) and finding anything interactive was hard enough, much less something I’d call a game.
Recently, I came across Shape it Up, which is my favorite geology interactive so far. Players try to make one landscape look like another by choosing a force of nature (volcano, wind, water, glacier) and choosing a time period.
This is a wonderful game for young kids. There are several components that I think can be added or modified in order to make the game more sophisticated for middle school kids. Continue Reading…
My blood was a’ boiling this morning after reading an article on edweek about an investigation done by the College Board:
… can a student get the same level of experience from a virtual dissection online, without actually smelling the formaldehyde or making a cut?
In recent years, the College Board, which authorizes AP classes and offers college-level material to high school students, has been trying to determine whether simulated labs in some science courses can take the place of real-world experiments. It’s a debate that online science providers and hands-on teachers are grappling with as well.
With our energy games mostly planned, I’ve been turning my attention towards thinking about the geology unit we will be starting o n this summer and trying to find some game idea inspirations for that topic. To do this, I’ve been poking around the web to see what is out there. Here are a few websites I uncovered in my exploration:
It isn’t quite geology but it does what I do love about it is its page on “Junk Science Detection” and a great explanation about the role of peer review. There is a real intellectual crisis when it comes to evaluating data, especially scientific data and having it laid out in such a straightforward manner is welcome and necessary. Too often, we take political opinion as fact.
I’ve never formally studied geology (along with meteorology it is the only science I’ve really neglected) so I loved how crisp, clear, straightforward and well illustrated this particular interactive was. It is a very elegant piece.
Now found at learner.org, these are free, on demand, and impeccably produced videos. I cannot believe how readily accessible these gems are. I’m using them to get a crash course in geology.
This project was apparently inspired by a scientist who taught inmates in a California prison field geology. There are several great ideas for activities, especially for younger grades.
You can see that my approach is to examine a smattering of media. I need video game ideas, but so far I’ve gotten a lot out of movies, interactives, lesson plans, and presentations. Merging ideas from all of these helps me eventually hone in on a game idea. If you have any other geology resources, of know of anything that could make a great geology game, send me a tweet @mchmiel
Recently, I came across 
