by Dr. Erich Longie, Lead Cultural Consultant While demonstrating our games for teachers, parents and students at the Tribal Disability Conference at Turtle Mountain this week, I was thinking about how learning about math together with Dakota culture makes perfect sense. Native Americans are one of the two involuntary minorities in […]
AnnMaria De Mars
In my last post, I talked about making educational games that are educational. When game designers and programmers create math games, they often have little idea of what math children are learning in a given grade, in what order, nor what types of hints to provide. In short, unsurprisingly, the […]
Making Educational Games That Are Games
I’ll be speaking at the Serious Play conference next month on Making Educational Games That Add Up . My basic premise is that too often educational games are designed by gaming companies, in which case they are not very educational, or by educators , in which case, they are not […]
Making Educational Games That Are Educational
It might seem odd that we have a tweet-up at mixed martial arts competitions. Seriously, what do arm bars and math have in common? More than you might think – I once did a survival analysis example with the dependent variable as how long an opponent lasts in a match […]
7 Generation Games Tweet-up: A family tradition
Last post was what we accomplished. We also learned a lot, I think. First of all, when we do this again, we will be clearer up front about how much time we expect to spend on the project. I think most of us did not realize how much this week was […]
Lessons learned from anti-hackathon
Wrapping up the anti-hackathon and it seemed a good idea to do a post-mortem. What happened? We accomplished A LOT. In a week, we: Drafted a skeleton of the game design, Drafted the story line for 2/7 of the game, Created characters for 2/7 of the game, Created three video clips, […]
Anti-hackathon report: Part 1- What Happened
Every day, I get out of bed excited to start working. There is only one problem – with so much to be done, it’s always a question of what to do first. Take our game Spirit Lake- it’s playable. Almost no errors (I say almost because the second I declare […]
More or Better: The Design Question Every Day
We had our kick-off meeting today and it went great. Of the 10 people who expressed an interest, 7 showed up, either virtually or in person. We had minor Google hangout issues with people needing to install a plug in and sound/ picture sporadic for some people, but we made it […]
Anti-hackathon off and running
Below are the students who won the Fish Lake game this semester. We actually are in the middle of development of this game, so these students made it to the final level to date. More levels are in the making … I just received some cool prizes – flash drives […]
Fish Lake Winners – human ones
Even though I spent last night and this morning in Ojai, I’ve still been getting a good bit of work done. Right now, I’m sitting on the porch at the Lavender Inn typing away at the Fish Lake Game Design Document, adding more math to Level One in keeping with […]
Something about snakes
A friend of mine commented on one of his young employees as, “The worst combination you can get – someone who isn’t interested in the work and doesn’t need the money.” There are lots of advantages of being born into a well-off family. Your family can provide you introductions to […]
The Advantage of Being Poor
Where to even begin … Don’t misunderstand me, I get up every morning and am happy to get to work. The problem is, there is just so much that goes into building a game AND a company. I had a great time at the East Los Angeles College STEAM (Science, […]