A quickie: here’s an interesting game from Canada where users have to find various interesting geometrical properties by eye and are assessed programmatically on their accuracy:
My score as about 3.03, having frustratingly crepty above an accuracy score of 3 with a shocking 9 in my final problem.
Launchball is a game produced for the Science Museum website. It is an excellent and well thought out little game that has highly transparent educational content. Despite this, it it fun to play.
Most of the puzzles deal with the concepts of power and force, both in terms of their generation and their effect. The aim is to make a little (metal) ball reach a particular goal. It can be done by using wind power to blow the ball, magnetism to attract it, or ‘rollers’ to move the ball along. Some or all of these effects require power, and the different mechanisms for generating and transferring power are really interesting and innovative.
This game is a wonderful way to introduce physics.
Firaxis Games, the makers of one of the greats of computer gaming Civilisation, discuss on their website the growing trend for computer games to be used in the educational arena. It is encouraging that educators are starting to understand the potential of technology to educate, though I suspect that the use of commercial games as educational tools is an transitional step before bespoke educational games begin to be produced with production values that begin to approach those of commercial games.
One of Firaxis’ contributors Kurt Squire proposes Civilisation as a good model for learning about World History. There is an interesting tension here. On the one hand, a game like Civilisation engages students in such a way that they build a sophisticated model of the game in order to succeed at it. That is good educationally to the extent to which the game models genuine historical processes. It is not clear that the ‘history’ that Civilisation presents is particularly convincing.
While Kurt Squire argues that Civilisation “represents world history not as a story of colonial domination or western expansion, but as an emergent process arising from overlapping, interrelated factors”, it does still give an essentially American - or at least New World - view of history. Land is virgin territory until moved into by the great civilisations; pre-colonial Afrians, native Americans, native Australian Aborigones do not have a story. Intellectual and technological progress happens linearly; the Middle ages and the loss of Roman and Greek learning cannot happen. There is no potential for a European type of historio-political scenario; states are the size of continents.
On the other hand, if one ignores the problems with the historical model, it does offer a ‘big picture view’ of history. Could such a grand model of historical processes be so readily expressed without the means of technology? Certainly the answer is yes, though it would take an extremely talented teacher, and those are notoriously thin on the ground.
The pipedream is for someone to create a game with production values on a par with Civilisation, but which takes as its starting point an historical model that aims at accuracy. This of course, is rather like desiring an historically accurate documentary that looks and sounds like a Hollywood movie, but there will surely be moves towards higher production values in educational software in the future.
Problem solving should feel like this: Sliding Block Puzzle. At the time of writing I haven’t yet worked out how to finish the puzzle. However, I’m fairly certain that it involves getting the red square out of the hole at the other end of the puzzle.
Getting students to play this, and getting students to talk about strategies, and recognising medium and short term goals would be a wonderful way to get them to while away some time while thinking furiously.
Plupon is a strange little game, but it is a good concept. With a bit of work, this could be a real gem of a game. The instructions are not that clear: you have to add number bubbles up to multiples of 10, but you can also in the interim add lower denominations to a value under 10, so if you see a 0, 1 and 2 floating down you can combine them to make 3 without a penalty. In fact, the first couple of levels are very dull unless you do!