Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

The video games I grew up with involved dodging bullets, lasers, ninjas, and occasionally Mike Tyson. In Spent, the object is to avoid becoming homeless.

Spent is an outreach project from Urban Ministries of Durham, a charity based in Durham, North Carolina dedicated toward giving basic essentials to the poor and homeless. The game paints a grim picture of life for people who can barely keep a place to live. The object is to make it 30 days without running out of money. At the start of the game, you’re down to your last $1,000, and you need to find a job and an apartment. A bad economy means slim pickings for both. Cheaper rent means living farther away from work, which increases both your fuel costs as well as the wear and tear on your car.

Like a computerized embodiment of Murphy’s Law, Spent confronts you with one misfortune after another. To win, you have to make a series of hard choices that have no apparent right answer. For example, you wake up one morning to find that someone has siphoned all the gas from your car. Do you take three buses (and three hours) to show up for work late? Or just call in sick and miss out on a day’s wages? (Your low-level temp job doesn’t give paid sick days.) What do you do when your kid is about to fail his math course unless he gets help? Paying $50 for a tutor means not being able to fix your car, which is falling to pieces because of your marathon commute to work every day. I played three rounds of Spent and successfully made it to the end of the month twice. After completing a winning round with $98 left to my name, the game reminded me, “And your rent’s due again. What are you going to do next month?”

I feel fortunate that I’ve never been in such dire straits as those presented in Spent. The game does a good job of giving a sense of the desperation felt by people who live on the fringes. Spent would be a good addition to an economics or social studies class to illustrate the effects of a recession, or to show how some of our nation’s homeless got that way.

Spent

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Try to erase North Carolina’s defecit with the Balance the Budget Challenge

Try to balance the state budget with the Backseat Budgeter

BY BILL FERRIS

Here in North Carolina, we’re coping with a budget shortfall. Valuable programs are facing cuts, and a lot of people are going to lose their jobs. I don’t envy Governor Bev Perdue or anyone else making these decisions, as pretty much any decision they make will make life worse for a lot of people. You can help convey the stakes of the situation to your students with the Balance the Budget Challenge, a game from the North Carolina governor’s office that lets us common folk try to balance a budget with a $2.4 billion deficit.

The Balance the Budget Challenge presents you with dozens of options that can cut the state budget. Should you raise tuition to universities or community colleges? Release a few thousand prisoners from jail? Or perhaps you’d care to eliminate all school-nurse jobs in the state? You can also take measures that will promote long-term growth but raise the deficit in the short term — for example, you could increase financial incentives for business to move to North Carolina. When you’ve finished the challenge, simply press a button to submit your budget proposal to the Governor.

What struck me the most about the BTBC was the sheer number of cuts you need to make — after I cut what seemed like a massive amount of programs, I found I still had a few hundred million left to go. Lest you start on a slash-and-burn campaign in the hopes of “winning” the budget, the game also presents you with the consequences of your decisions — that is, you get to see an exact tally of how many people you just sent to the unemployment line.

My only complaint about BTBC was that it asks you to make cuts to education before any other category. Obviously some category had to be listed first, but I nearly gutted the public education budget altogether before I realized I had six more pages of possible cuts to consider. I have no idea if anyone in power actually reads these proposals, but front-loading the game with cuts to school spending potentially sends a message that North Carolina citizens see educational spending as expendable.

That complaint aside, I recommend the Balance the Budget Challenge as a fun, if sobering look at how a state budget operates. It does a good job of teaching about both fiscal responsibility and the human consequences of financial decisions.

Balance the Budget Challenge

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

If you’ve ever muttered under your breath about spoiled kids, you’ve probably later remembered that it’s not the kids’ fault. Their worldview only reflects their reality; to understand the plight of the developing world they’d need to experience it. And while a field trip to Nigeria isn’t feasible, your students can play a simulation like Third World Farmer.

I find the name a bit distasteful, but move past this label and you’ll find a game that captures the realities of rural life in Sub-Saharan Africa. You begin the game with a family of four, a small house, and an empty field. If you’re successful growing crops and raising livestock, the family can afford education and medical care, or try to increase their farm output by purchasing tools. Throughout the game, situations arise like new children, marriage proposals, and job opportunities in the city.

It sounds simple enough, but almost every turn brings challenges beyond the family’s control. Theft, drought, disease, and war frequently undermine your accomplishments and force you to rebuild from scratch. It’s not easy to succeed, and that’s why this is such an effective simulation. It’s shocking to see your family’s livestock stolen by refugees or its children grow up with only a few years of education.

Beyond giving a glimpse of life in the developing world, the site also shows how you can help. It includes links to more than a dozen organizations that work to ease poverty like UNICEF, Oxfam, and Doctors without Borders. Once students play the game, they’ll be better prepared to discuss rural poverty and learn about what these relief organizations do.

Third World Farmer

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Knoword is a site that is sure to keep the vocabulary part of your brain nimble and quick. Players are given the first letter of a word, then a short definition. From there, they have one minute to type in as many correct words as they can.Correct words provide you with some bonus time. (Registered users have access to features such as archiving their scores and more). While I found the regular mode challenging enough, there is a “hard” mode for those Scrabble/Crossword experts whose way with words can amaze just about anyone (you know who you are). On a recent play, the words ranged from Cat to Harness to Labyrinth, which gives you a good idea of the range of words and challenges drawn randomly from an online dictionary database.

This site might be a nice activity for middle and high school students who need a little more practice with vocabulary and fluency. The challenge of the clock might give some students a bit of intrinsic motivation, although others might get turned off by the time limits. One nice feature is that you can skip words that you find are too hard, so you won’t get caught in some endless loop of difficulty.

Knoword

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Here’s what’s going on at the NASA Earth Observatory, brought to you by Fred Beyer at EarthSciTeach.

Latest Images

Tropical Cyclone Yasi

Ozone Hole through the years

Brasília at Night

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A Day of Night-Shining Clouds

Night-Shining Clouds are Getting Brighter

Arctic Oscillation Chills North America, Warms Arctic

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Little Instrument that Could Reaches Flight Milestone

NASA Scientists Study More Than Rockets in the ‘Deep South’

NASA’s Salt-Seeking Instrument Gets Blanketed in Silver

Headlines from the press, radio, and television

Greenland glaciers spring surprise

Survey to probe Arctic ice melt

Coral Moves North to Beat the Heat

Drought in Dixie

Experts seek Arctic climate early warning system

‘Hidden Plumbing’ Helps Slow Greenland Ice Flow: Hotter Summers May Actually Slow Down Flow of Glaciers

First-Ever Global Map of Surface Permeability Informs Water Supply, Climate Modelling

Time Machine for Climate Scientists: Earth’s Extreme Weather Events Since 1871 Reanalyzed

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Aging and failed satellites jeopardize efforts to collect data on climate change

BY AARON FOWLES

This year, I started a chess club at my school. It has been a great time seeing kids from north Memphis give up one afternoon per week to play chess at school. In order to make the club a little more competitive, I rated the players according to their wins and losses. I wanted to make this match the United States Chess Federation as closely as possible, so I used a rating program.

ELO Rater, now in version 2.0, was my program of choice. I tried several others, but this was the only one that combined ease of use with simple design. Most chess rating programs are tournament organizing programs, which are quite complex and not well suited to casual club play. This program allows users to enter in-game data in real time and receive ratings adjustments on the spot.

I can’t understate how much of a change this program has made in the club. It allows me to get a quick idea of how well each student is playing, and it allows me to make fair match-ups for casual play. There are still free tournament programs out there that are better for larger tournaments. The program, which runs on Windows and Linux using Wine, can keep track of different groups of people, so you can use one copy of the program to manage different groups of students.

ELO Rater

BY BILL FERRIS

Life is a fragile thing — slight variations in a planet’s mass or its distance from its sun can all mean the difference between a thriving global ecosystem and a cold, dead rock floating through space. If I sound bitter, it’s because I’ve just created five or six uninhabitable worlds in Extreme Planet Makeover, a planet-building simulator from NASA and the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This fun application lets you manipulate several conditions that make a planet conducive to life as we know it — the planet’s age, its distance from the sun, the planet it’s based on (more on that in a minute), what type of star it orbits, and more. To create a habitable planet, you have to hit a very narrow nexus of each of the factors, and your students can plan to spend a good deal of trial and error trying to build something they could live on.

You can choose between three planets to use as a template — Earth, Mars, and Gliese 581 d, a large “Super-Earth” with a rocky surface that scientists think could possibly harbor life. I think it’s pretty fun to play around with a distant planet that might actually have life on it, just as it is to renovate Mars into a place where some little green men might want to settle down.

Through playing this game, I learned several new things about the planetary life cycle, like the fact that as a planet gets older, its core cools down and all liquid water sinks into the crust, which is only a problem if you’re an organism that needs water to live. Extreme Planet Makeover has lots of facts like that, there for the learning.

Of course, this game really brings to light how little we know about life in the universe. Is an Earth-like planet the only place life could survive? We just don’t know, but Extreme Planet Makeover does a good job of illustrating what we do know. And with enough patience and mouse clicking, you too can finally build a planet you could theoretically call home (see Planet Ferris above).

Extreme Planet Makeover

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

I once had a student in my world history class who was about as lazy as they come. He rarely did homework and spent most of his class time scheming up ways to avoid assignments. So how did this student know more history than 90 percent of his classmates? He played Age of Empires religiously.

The power of video games to engage and teach is undeniable. But historical video games aren’t exactly mainstream, so cases like that student have long been exceptions. Mission US is among the first of a new type of game created specifically for schools and bringing access to all students.

Entirely free and web-based, Mission US puts you in the shoes of a teenage boy in Boston just before the American Revolution. You have to complete a variety of tasks around the city while meeting people and making choices that affect the outcome of the game. Ultimately, after witnessing the Boston Massacre, the hero has to decide if he’ll support the patriot cause or not. It’s this deep storyline that sets Mission US apart from other educational games. The adventure is divided into six episodes and takes about 90 minutes to complete. Students can save and resume their game, allowing them to play certain parts and then do corresponding activities provided in the teacher’s guide. Your teacher account will allow you to track each student’s progress to make sure everyone’s keeping up. And whether you have students play together or separately, in school or at home, the guide provides tips for each situation.

This is why it’s exciting to be a teacher in 2010 — Mission US is a dream come true for teachers who want to integrate a full-length video game into their class. Keep your eyes on this project, as a second “mission” is in development that will deal with the anti-slavery movement before the Civil War.

Mission US

Mission US video trailer

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BY BILL FERRIS

Earlier this year we told you about InterroBang, a game of real-life missions that challenge students’ creativity and problem-solving skills. They’ve just launched their second edition, which runs until January 31, 2011.

If you’re not familiar with InterroBang, here’s a sample mission, worth 10 points, to give you an idea of what you’re in for:

“Have you ever wondered who delivers your mail, collects your trash, or waters your lawn? These jobs are a necessity to daily life but unfortunately, these important workers go unthanked. Take time to meet your mail carrier, sanitation worker, or other person who facilitates your life that you’ve never met before. Learn their name and something significant about their life. Take a picture with your new friend and write about your experience.”

To sign up and get your students playing InterroBang, simply visit their website, or read their About page.

InterroBang

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Everyone would agree that it’s important to learn about personal finance, yet many kids grow up without the skills to manage their money. This is probably because the topic was never put in the context of a pig riding a jet ski. Play Debt Ski with your students and they should see things more clearly.

The game dresses basic economic concepts in a cartoonish summer look. You have to steer the pig through an obstacle course, helping him grab as many coins (income) as possible. Along the way you also need to pick up necessities while avoiding too many luxuries (though they make your pig happy). At the end of the course your income and expenses are tallied, leaving you with savings or debt. You can then buy upgrades to your ski, but beware the pitfalls of credit cards! This is one of the most teachable aspects of the game, as there are credit limits, minimum payments, and interest on unpaid debt.

Pass all eight levels and you’ll get a final score based on the savings, debt, and happiness points you’ve accumulated. There’s no end to the score you can earn, which will encourage healthy competition among students. After playing Debt Ski, they can check out the game’s parent site, InDebtEd, which is designed to help college students navigate the jungle of student expenses. High school students will be there soon, so they might as well start learning personal finance now.

Debt Ski

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

I don’t fully understand it, but crossword puzzles have a seemingly magical power that compels students to complete them immediately. No pep talk necessary — as soon as the puzzle reaches their desks, pencils just start moving. There are plenty of crossword creators out there, but I’ve never found one more useful than the Instant Online Crossword Puzzle Maker.

This app is a star because it works smoothly and avoids the hurdles that inevitably appear in other crossword generators. This one requires no registration and places no limits on the length or amount of words. Once the words and clues are entered, it auto-sizes the crossword to fit on one page and prints right every time. It also produces a printable answer key.

I like to type my clues as a document, then paste everything with one click into the Instant Online Crossword Puzzle Maker. I can then go back to that document and combine words from several units into a big review puzzle at the end of the semester.

A crossword puzzle is a great way to present a vocabulary list because students must work to find the words themselves. With this app it’s also possible to have students make crosswords for their classmates to complete. But make sure they double-check spelling! One extra letter can throw off the whole puzzle.

Instant Online Crossword Puzzle Maker

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Is there anything more stressful to a high school junior or senior than having to take the SAT test on a Saturday morning? Maybe it’s more stressful writing the college essay, but surely the SAT is right up there. Kaplan Test Prep has recently released a gaming app for the iPad/iPhone called FutureU. The app is free, although the versions for other platforms (PC, Mac and Nintendo DS) cost money.

FutureU contains reading, writing, and math games. A handful of SAT-style quizzes also help students get into the mode of the standardized SAT test. A nice added bonus is the raft of test-taking strategies and pointers from the Kaplan archives. A progress meter is embedded into the app to keep track of how a user is doing on different skills.

Kaplan makes it clear at that FutureU is not a practice SAT test. “It is a collection of games that are rooted in test prep curriculum and will help the player become familiar with key math, reading and writing elements that they will find on the SAT,” according to Kaplan. Still, it might be worth injecting a little fun into the otherwise-tedious work of preparing for the SAT.

FutureU

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BY REBECCAH HAINES

With BuddyPress, a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform, you can create your own social networking site for your school or classroom.

BuddyPress isn’t too difficult to use, though it isn’t as “point-and-clicky” as I would like. You’ll need to download and install the WordPress platform first, then BuddyPress software, then add the BuddyPress files to your WordPress program. The website claims it takes five minutes, but from my explorations, it takes at least a moderate amount of technical skill, so ask your IT person if you need help. Once you get everything downloaded and installed, BuddyPress provides basic templates for building your social network. You can see some samples of what people have created here.

Obviously, building your own social networking site as a teacher has its advantages. We all know how fascinated kids are with Facebook and MySpace, so creating a school-appropriate space should be inherently interesting. Naturally, you’ll clearly need to set ground rules for use to prevent too many off-topic discussions, but when kids are really interested in using something, they tend to follow the directions for using it.

In sum, BuddyPress looks like a good opportunity for educators, especially if you’ve got the need, the drive, and the skill to do a little bit more tech-nerd stuff to create your classroom network.

BuddyPress

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

SpellingCity presents a multitude of activities students can use to practice spelling. A teacher simply enters the spelling words, and SpellingCity presents several options for what to do with them. Choices include:

“Test Me,” which repeats each spelling word with a live voice and uses it in a sentence. I put in a few words from my students’ vocabulary list and clicked here. The site creates a text box for students to write the word after they hear it spoken by the automated voice. What I liked best was that SpellingCity then used my word in a sentence. The site has a large database of words and sentences that it draws from.

(more…)

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Inspired by President Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign, the National STEM Video Game Challenge aims to motivate interest in STEM learning by tapping into students’ natural passions for playing and making video games.

The exact evaluation criteria is not completely clear, except for this explanation:

Submissions will be judged on a combination of fun and balanced game play, creative vision and incorporation of STEM concepts in game design and play experience. Paper-based game designs will be judged separately from playable games.

There are two levels of competition: a middle school (grades 5-8) program and a program for younger designers (pre-K through grade 4), with prizes ranging from laptops for the schools to game-design tools for students. I like how the site lays out the rationale for bringing gaming into the classroom with this competition (which runs through the course of the school year) and also why they are focusing on middle school students. All the games must be aligned with the National Science Educational Standards and the Common Core standard for Math (more information about that is here).

In addition to backing from the White House, this competition is sponsored by a series of big-name technology companies, including Microsoft, AMD and more.

If you are interested, visit their application page.

STEM Video Game Challenge

Additional resources

Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health by Ann My Thai, David Lowenstein, Dixie Ching, and David Rejeski

Moving Learning Games Forward by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, and Katie Salen

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