BY BILL FERRIS
As schools move away from rote memorization of facts, what happens to those kids who like to rattle off the state capitals or list all the presidents? They can put their knowledge of educational trivia to good use at Sporcle, a site filled with countless list-style quizzes that will exercise kids’ knowledge of…well, just about everything.
BY BILL FERRIS
Try your hand at balancing a state budget with the Colorado Backseat Budgeter, an online application from the Bighorn Leadership Development Program at Colorado State University. The Backseat Budgeter lets you decide how much to spend on health care, roads, education, social services and so forth, while raising or lowering tax rates to make up for budget shortfalls. In keeping with these hard economic times, the Backseat Budgeter starts you approximately $800 million in the hole.
BY BILL FERRIS
As further proof that my pop-culture awareness stopped sometime in the mid-90s, this month’s random roundup features Indiana Jones, apparently Instructify’s go-to reference to convey that a history or archaeology tool is exciting or adventurous in some capacity.
Of course, now that they’re making a fifth Indiana Jones movie, I don’t feel quite so dated.
National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid: Archaeology with No Risk of Snakes or Nazis!
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist like Indiana Jones and I dreamed about being on Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple. Sadly, I’m not currently exploring foreign lands for ancient artifacts and getting chased by Nazis, nor did I ever get the chance to be a Blue Barracuda. But with National Geographic’s Explore a Pyramid, your students can have the opportunities that I never did, and learn while doing it!
BY BILL FERRIS
In Escape from the Mummy’s Tomb! your elementary students must recover Egyptian artifacts from inside a pyramid. As the title of the game has no doubt alerted you, you’ll have to wrest these artifacts from an undead mummy’s cold, dead, bandaged fingers.
After your students have finished their archaeological adventure, they’ll find themselves in a museum, where they must put the artifacts in their proper display cases. (more…)
“Who are you? Who, who, who who?” Every Thursday night I wait for that song to come on the TV with the start of one of my favorite shows. Chances are, many of your students feel the same way. So, why not engage them in some real science learning by playing CSI: The Experience — Web Adventures, created by Rice University.
BY BILL FERRIS
The scavenger hunt, the good twin of the wild-goose chase, can be a fun way to exercise students’ creativity and problem-solving skills. This video from Howcast shows you how to put together a scavenger hunt using modern tools like cell phones and multimedia. Using smart phones, the hunters in the video solve riddles via text message, snap pictures of interesting landmarks, and dial a secret number for the next clue by solving a math problem.
While I haven’t done this myself, it looks like a fun way to fuse technology and education. This idea is swollen with educational opportunities — incorporating study questions into the clues, challenging kids to find creative solutions, or promoting collaboration and teamwork — and you can adapt it for just about any subject.
BY BILL FERRIS
During a recent flu outbreak, I only let 1400 people die. Go me!
I’ve just played The Great Flu, an online game designed to teach people about flu pandemics and how to control them. Your task: try to control a flu pandemic somewhere in the world. At your disposal: an array of tools and tactics such as distributing facemasks, stockpiling “wild guess” vaccines that may or may not help, informing the populace, and extremes such as shutting down airports and isolating victims. Every measure you take costs money, and if you pony up funds for improved health care in China, you’ll have to spend it again if the flu migrates across the border to India.
BY BILL FERRIS
Before all these fancy-shmancy video games, folk used to play games on slabs of cardboard. “Board games” we called ‘em, and I don’t recall people getting bored playing them.
Now, a few of you creative types as like as not have games you play in your class. You think to yourself, “This is a pretty fun game, and my students actually learn something. I wish I could play this on an actual game board instead of drawing it on the blackboard like a caveman.” Well, you can make your game idea a reality with The Game Crafter.
BY BILL FERRIS
How far would your students go to save a lost pet? Would they infiltrate a nefarious underground factory that turns cuddly animals into food? Would they disguise themselves as monsters to outsmart gremlins, golems and yetis? Would they still go through all this rigmarole if they knew it was a way to practice their math skills?
Lure of the Labyrinth is an mathematics game from Maryland Public Television designed for middle-school pre-algebra students. The protagonist, a kid who’s just had his beloved pet abducted by Bigfoot and taken to a subterranean food mill, has to solve a series of math-based puzzles to get him back. The puzzles focus on proportions, ratios, fractions, and variables.
BY BILL FERRIS
When I grew up, playing video games was the opposite of a healthy lifestyle — hours of sitting on my butt, staring at the TV, and not socializing (I did, however, rescue various princesses and punch out Mike Tyson).
Humana Games for Health wants to erase the stereotype of the chubby weakling shoving Cheetos in his mouth while mashing buttons in a dark basement. They’re looking reward you handsomely for your ideas for a healthy video game in their InsertCoin competition.
Historical intrigue! Puzzle-solving skills! GPS units? No, its not the latest in the National Treasure franchise. (Nic Cage lovers can only wish!) Instead, it’s a fun new game called “Spy in the City” from the International Spy Museum, in Washington, DC. This AP piece helps debrief new agents on this new interactive mission assignment.
Part geocaching game and part tour through historical landmarks, this is a new strategy we may see more museums adopting as they trend more towards interactivity. Kids are more inclined towards hands-on learning than the velvet rope, “Please don’t touch the display case” atmosphere of the traditional museum. Since the spy trade conjures up images of cool gadgets, the interactive approach seems really ideal.
BY BILL FERRIS
Summertime means fishing, camping trips, taking Junior to the zoo, and hitting the beach. All of those activities put you into contact with the wonders (or if you’re unlucky, the terrors) of the animal kingdom. July’s random roundup brings you the best Instructify posts that feature critters other than humans.
Tune in to The Great Turtle Race
The Great Turtle Race raises public awareness of leatherback turtle migration, plus threats to the creature’s survival, through the magic of sports. The site has lots of nifty race stats, such as how many hour-long dives each turtle makes. You can cheer on your favorite turtle, and elect to receive daily updates on how it’s doing in the field.
Free course, y’all! (I write Southern now.) Game Design Concepts is an experimental class in game design and pedagogy being taught by Ian Schreiber, a game designer with several years in the video game industry. Registration in the course is free, but there is a required textbook. No problem there, right now it is listed for less than $20 on Amazon. You had better act fast — the class starts Monday, June 29th. Sorry for the short notice on this one.
The aim of this course isn’t to teach you the technical code work involved in designing a game, but rather the theoretical and conceptual design issues. You know, the kind of stuff that keeps a really good video game from ending up like Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge.
At the end of this course you should be familiar enough with the processes to start developing your own games. This can be particularly beneficial if you’re kicking around the idea of being a consultant for some game-based learning developers. At the very least, though, it will help a teacher in any capacity gain a more critical eye when evaluating games for their classroom.
Games aren’t just for fun, but for learning too
Stereotypes about video gamers debunked
TVO Kids - flashy, freaky, functional fun
Photo credit: striatic on Flickr.
If your geography students haven’t learned the locations of all the states by now, maybe they need a little game-based incentive. Know Your States is a geography game where students have to plop all 50 states into their correct positions on the map. Sure, they can handle gimmies like Alaska and Hawaii, but can they find Rhode Island when they don’t have the rest of the eastern seaboard as a reference?
Know Your States isn’t the most robust game, but it’s a fun diversion, and will hopefully give your students a better idea of where Wyoming is, just in case their parents take them to Yellowstone on summer vacation. -BILL FERRIS
Travel the World, Meet Interesting People, Pwn Them - Geosense
Choke on Your Own Hubris as You Fail to Name All 50 States in 10 Minutes
And they’re off! If you forgot to place your wager on this year’s Great Turtle Race from National Geographic, you can still follow along as 11 leatherback sea turtles make their way from Canada to the warm waters of the Caribbean.
The Great Turtle Race raises public awareness of leatherback turtle migration, plus threats to the creature’s survival, through the magic of sports. The site has lots of nifty race stats, such as how many hour-long dives each turtle makes. You can cheer on your favorite turtle, and elect to receive daily updates on how it’s doing in the field.
The site is more than just race-themed environmentalism, however. It also has great turtle information, like the fact that leatherback turtles dive as deep as whales do, feasting on jellyfish and other jelly creatures they encounter. You and your students can play a turtle race game, piloting your own turtle as you try to eat jellyfish and avoid seaweed and garbage. Or test your turtle knowledge with an online quiz. Everything you wanted to know about sea turtles, plus the stuff you didn’t know you wanted to know, you can find it here.
In keeping with the racing theme, the turtles all have ridiculous names right out of the Kentucky Derby like Nightswimmer and Lindblad the Explorer. Which reminds me, if you had any action on Backspacer, get ready to cash in. -BILL FERRIS
Related stuff:
Fit a 100-foot blue whale on your monitor
Live every week like it’s Shark Week
Discover the Undersea World with Ocean Explorer
Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Briny Deep? Monsters of the Deep Sea
moxie design studios
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