Steve Jobs Book

Has anyone read the Steve Jobs book? Just wondering if we had an EDTEC review yet...

Learning Latin through a role playing game.

Operation Lapis is a collaborative role playing game, which student players are given discovery missions which require translating in order to save and rebuild Western Civilization. Groups are given a Roman, and with this character, students are immersed in ancient Rome and have to not only read Latin but think like Romans. Through an online portal, students are given a narrative in both English and Latin and required to respond.

Students can direct their characters to begin a war or interpret and inscription on stone to solve a mystery. Students receive "Latiny" Points (Like Experience Points in RPGs) in how their response and direction to their character considers the world-view of the team's Roman, and they include as much Latin as possible.

This game tackles both Attention and Relevance by letting students explore the narrative as a game, where they are active and not passive learners.

The collaborative nature of the game, and the fact that the students can see how other students have responded in this portal, builds Confidence, as students can see the various outcomes of other teams.

Everyone knows that experiential/immersive language learning is far more effective that class room/text book vocabulary-based language learning, and thus the effective and fun nature of this class is very Satisfying to the student gamers.

Designer Board Games

While researching ideas for our board game project I came upon a couple of very interesting articles about "designer board games." At first I thought "designer" had to do with the beautiful design on the box. Further reading however taught me that "designer board games" are also known as German-style games. The difference between designer board games and traditional board games is that the designer games don't often rely on luck to declare a winner. Instead, the games are more focused on strategy development. Other qualities of designer board games include: simple rules, excellent replay value, and their appeal to casual gamers in addition to hard core gamers. While the "Arab Spring" game designed by Leslie Thompson and myself does have some of the qualities of a designer game, it probably is more closely related to a traditional board game. http://boardgames.about.com/od/news/a/designer_games.htm http://geekgold.com/2011/02/27/designer-board-games/