Plimoth Plantation

Are you interested in becoming a Historian? If so, Plimoth Plantation is the place for you. Come join Sarah and Dancing Hawk as they guide you through what really happened at the harvest festival in 1621. This is also referred to as "The First Thanksgiving", but is this true?

You will need Macromedia Flash Player 6 to view this site.

Once the participant enters the site they are able to choose from 6 activities. At the bottom of the screen there is a glossary, visit the expert, and teacher's guide tabs.

1. Fact or Myth - A series of pictures is shown on the screen. The participant drags the proper description to each picture. If the participant is wrong, there will be a sound and they can try again. If the participant is correct, the description will snap to the picture.

2. The Evidence - The participant is given part of an article to decipher. The participante can hear how Edward Winslow would have read this blurb out load in 1621. At the end of this piece, some sections are highlighted. The participant can click on the color and it will explain that section better.

3. The Wampanoag People - A series of rocks is placed around a circle. The participant is to choose one and listen to what it was like for the Wampanoag people in 1621. A movie clip is shown at the conclusion.

4. The English Colonists - Explore where the colonists lived. Enter a house and answer some multiple choice questions (responses included).

5. The Path to 1621 - Here the participant will explore how the Wampanoag and colonists might have felt about each other at the 1621 harvest festival.

6. Share what you've discovered - The participant can choose to write an exhibit label about one picture or design a museum exhibit.

I didn't feel like the participant was interacting enough. All information was given. The graphics and presentation were wonderful. The site is definitely worth a visit.

Happy Turkey Day to all!

Hidden Agenda Contest

The Liemandt Foundation, a non-profit foundation focused on promoting technology-enabled education, is hosting a college student video game development contest to challenge students to build entertaining games that "secretly" teach middle school subjects. Games will be judged in May for a chance at the grand prize of $25,000. Advising the contest are Richard Garriott and Marc Prensky. They hope the contest will enable college students to understand the importance and potential of "stealth education." The final judging of the games is based on 70% entertainment and 30% educational value because, as program director Lauren Davis says, "Children will only learn from the games they want to play."

For more information on the contest go to the Hidden Agenda website.

Astronomy Simulations

Here is a website for the amateur astronomer. It appears to be a website for an introductory astronomy class. It contains various simulations that include measuring the stellar parallax, eclipsing binary stars, a binary star system and Stellar Evolution. When you click on one of these simulations you view each in motion. Underneath each simulation is a description of the simulation and an explanation of what is occurring. Finally, if you so desire, you can enter in different values and then see how those different values change the simulations. An interesting website for people just beginning their studies in astronomy.

Simulating Real Lives

This is actually a simulation game from educational simulations. The name of the game is called "real lives". It is an interactive life simulation that enables you to live one of billions of lives in any country in the world. Through statistically accurate events, Real Lives brings to life different cultures, political systems, economic opportunities, personal decisions, health issues, family issues, schooling, jobs, religions, geography, war, peace, and more.

Net Frog

Frog dissection has been an indispensible part of biology class. However, back in 1994, a program called "Net Frog" was first created by Richard Strauss, Jean Foss, and Mable Kinzie and later developed into an online tutorial as a valuable preparation tool or even a useful substitute for laboratory dissection.

This may not be anything today, but back to 1994, when many softwares did not exist, this was quite something at that time! Actually, the "Net Frog" was one of the first educational simulations on the Internet.

The site has been much improved with advanced multimedia softwares in 2002 and now becomes "Net Frog: The Digital Dissection" with movies, images, texts, interactive exercises, and relevant research findings.

Mystery of the Doppler Effect

It is said that the doppler effect is comparatively easy to be recognized than explained or simulated. Here is an interactive lesson with vivid wave simulations. You can learn about the doppler effect by playing several different simulations on this site, watch mini-movies, and get further resources recomended by SMEs. This is really an educational and fun site!

Tips for Becoming a Game Designer

In an article on the TechTV website, Paul Reiche III, a game designer at Crystal Dynamics provides a series of tips and a "course catalogue" for would-be game designers. Not surprisingly, he points out that game design is a "mongrel discipline" that involves a broad range of skills. While most designers have a core skill like programming, art or writing, most have dabbled in many areas. In addition to programming, art and writing, valuable competencies include math, science and history. He also provides a list of the programs most commonly used in game design.

Educational Educators

Yikes. Zounds. Another disappointing teachers website. This one is called Educational Educators, and is sponsored by About.com. It purports to be Your guide to hundreds of educational web sites. And it is, if you define ‘Your guide’ as ‘A series of hyperlinks to hundreds of sites with little input as to the purpose or usefulness of those sites’.

Worse still, all of the input that Educational Educators provides about a site is positive. They’ve never seen a website that they don’t like, which serves as an indictment of their objectivity, and suggests that the site is merely a set of advertisements for those web sites that have curried favor with Educational Educators, in the form of advertising dollars or complementary hyperlink exchanges.

There are no actual reviews of educational sites here, only a set of categories and a number of sites under each topic with glowing words about how students love them, or how incredibly useful they are.

The online forums and chats are poorly attended with little insight into the fundamentals of good educational web site content development, and it is generally believed that our online hostess, Beth Lewis, exists only within the confines of the Educational Educators web server.

buzzcut.com

Buzzcut.com is a really awesome site that discusses everything about video game theory and critcism. Edited and produced by David Thomas, it features an open forum on a variety of topics including critical writing, games and society, books and articles, etc. On this particular page, David features video game vocabulary and a poster that describes the 20 aspects of what it feels like to play video games. You can download this poster for free.

Fantasy Stocks

Have you ever wanted to play the stock market with someone else's money? Well here's your chance. FantasyStocks.com, in it's fourth year, will generously give you $100,000 (fantasy dollars) to build your portfolio. All trades will cost you $25.00 from your fantasy dollars. Sounds interesting to me.

This on-line challenge is a FREE educational tool that can enrich your students' understanding of financial economics through a Web-based NYSE/NASDAQ stock market simulation. Students can learn how to do independent research on companies and industries, understand real financial charts, buy and sell stocks, and manage a portfolio of investments in a realistic setting without monetary risk. Students under 18 can participate, but they won't receive any prizes.

Each participant will be able to trade stocks from the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX, TSE, MSE, and other exchanges if available. I would be learning something just by knowing what each of these stood for.

Our eighth grade mathematics class investigates the stock market using Newspapers in Education (NIE). I think this site will bring a whole new meaning to the game. Students can now be actively involved on the computer and see what is happening daily.

Simulation Classification System

Chris Musslewaite, CEO of Discovery Learning, proposes a system to classify the levels of complexity in simulations in an article in ASTD's Learning Circuits Magazine. The goals of the sytem are to help trainers and facilitators become more confident in using simulations by giving them tools to describe their functionality and complexity when talking with clients and developers. The article includes matrices that map different criteria of simulation to trainer competencies and participant interactions.

Funbrain.com via Elementary Educators

I’ve worked as a computer support technician at a handful of elementary schools in the Cajon Valley Union School District; each school has a teacher designated as the Site Lead Technology Teacher, whose responsibility it is to help deal with technology issues on campus, including computer problems and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to attempt to help other site teachers incorporate technology into the curriculum.

Many of these teachers have done a good first pass over the net to locate decent sites for educational games and development of lesson plans. One site for educational software games that they virtually all point to is Funbrain. It seemed like a good idea to go to this site and see if it’s game software warranted all of the attention.

As it turns out, it really doesn’t. Virtually all of the games are of the ‘drill & kill’ variety (aka drill & practice, considered by most research to be the least effective type of educational software). Instructions on how to play the game are minimal, and always in text, never vocalized and/or animated via a PDA. As a result, for early elementary learners (K-2 or so), a teacher would have to mentor each student through the initial stages of each game.

I was mostly interested in games that worked on 1st and 2nd grade vocabulary. The available vocabulary games on funbrain are minimal; most of the games are mathematical in nature. There are far fewer in other lesson areas, such as history, science or language arts. I navigated through a few of the language arts and math games, and they all followed pretty much the same path. Given a small set of instructions, the player attempted to answer questions correctly. After each answer was submitted, the student was informed visually whether they answered right or wrong. The number of questions they answered correctly and incorrectly was recorded at the top of the browser window.

The problem had to do with the nature of the lesson design and the usability of the system. No lessons incorporated anything but rudimentary coaching (In the form of ‘pointers’ on where the student might be going wrong, or what they might focus on for optimal improvement). Of the little coaching that there was, all of it was textual in nature, never animated or via audio output. This seemed like a typical case where a conventional drill & kill paper and pencil lesson was dumped verbatim into a software game, instead of development of an alternative approach that made use of the inherent tools within the medium. From a usability standpoint, displays of questions and responses and scores were inconsistent between windows within a lesson, and between lessons within each area.

Overall, I found funbrain.com to be a poor website and a poor site name; it wasn’t very much fun, and I don’t believe that it will do much to stimulate a student’s brain.

Collective Detective

The Collective Detective is one of the newest forms of online communities. They participate in what are known as ARGs or Alternate Reality Games. These games can involve many elements both from the real and virtual world. These may include real world clues, phone calls, voicemail, email, and real people playing roles in real life. The Collective Detective collaborates to solve challenges and win prizes presented by other websites. Their track record shows that they are able to solve online puzzles at a fraction of the time of individual contestants. This “think tank” environment offers members an opportunity to learn together from experts in a variety of different fields. It also shows the types of productive social dynamics that are possible.

http://www.collectivedetective.org/

War Games

This website is an add on to the original Ghost Recon game. It is has been improved. What ghost recon is a simulation war game. People experience this game and get the feeling of what it is really like to be in a war-time situation. The creator of this website says military people who have been in combat say this is the most realistic war game they have ever played because you play against other people. The military is looking at using simulations similar to this to help train soldiers for combat. For those of us who have never been or even plan to be in combat, this game or simulation is perhaps the most realistic experience we can have.

Stupid Research Questions

In an article in the October, 2003 edition of his on-line newsletter, Play for Performance , Thiagi writes about the effectiveness of instructional games compared with other training methods. His response to the question of which is better can be summed up by the title of the article, “Stupid Research Questions.” He says that comparing training games and other training methods is like comparing apples and oranges. Both are “better” in certain situations and less appropriate in others. In comparing different training methods, it is critical to consider the purpose of the training and the nature of the participants, something to remember in any type of instructional design project.

Canadarm2 Astronaut Training System

Canadarm2 is a 35-foot crane-like machine aboard the International Space Station. Among other things, it is used to capture satellites and other free-flying objects in space. This is a difficult task that requires training in manual and visual dexterity. However, no practice was available once the astronauts arrived at the station. Through collaboration between Russian and Canadian space researchers, a simulator system has been developed that has the processing power to recreate the functions of the Canadarm2 and its interaction with other objects in space. The System for Maintaining and Monitoring Performance (SMP) On-Orbit Astronaut Training System consists of a small laptop computer which can interface with the station’s hand-controllers. It also uses a new simulation software tool known as SYMOFROS which was developed by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). The system was launched on-board the Soyuz Progress Transport on February 2, 2003.

http://www.spacedaily.com/news/iss-03o.html

WhatIfSports.com

http://www.whatifsports.com/locker/default.asp

Here's one for the sports fans out there. This site provides inquisitive or wager-oriented sports aficionados with SimMatchup™ and SimLeague™. These simulations allow fans to pit teams against each other in simulated games based on team and individual player stats. Users aren't just limited to past teams either, since current and future teams can be compared.

The system provides play-by-play (for certain sports) and scoring breakdowns for simulated games and complete player stats, as well. It can even run a pair of teams against each other many time to create win/loss and point margin probabilities.

eLearning with Disney

Not surprisingly, Disney Online has a graphically rich selection of "learning" games for younger kids on their site. Actually, once you get through the very commercial sections promoting the latest movies and theme parks, these games and simulations seem to offer a nice variety of creative activities for younger kids. There is also an overview page for grown-ups describing the activities. Some of these activities include games about spelling, the alphabet, good manners, music, playing with clay and more. They seemed to incorporate a lot of interactivity - not just passive observation. While a few of them had some tie-ins to Disney products, most of them did not. The games I viewed seemed to load a bit slowly on my reasonably fast computer with cable modem, which could cause problems with the "short-attention-span" crowd. However, once a given activity or game loaded up, the animations and response times were pretty impressive.

24 Game

Do you want to brush up on your mental mathematics? Then, this game is for you. You are given 4 numbers that you must add, subtract, multiply, or divide to get the result of 24. Look at the example to the right. Can you get 24? How long did it take you? Can you get 24 using another sequence?

One possible solution ... give the last step first and then tell your solution
You can only use each number 1 time from the card.

24 ÷ 1 = 24
4 • 3 = 12
12 • 2 = 24
24 ÷ 1 = 24

The 24® game helps students reinforce problem solving and critical thinking. You can also play the First in Math® online math program.

My students loved to play this at the end of the period. There are 3 levels (1 dot, 2 dot, 3 dot) for each game. The cards with 1 dot are supposed to be the easiest. When I first began this game, I even found the 1 dot cards challenging. Encourage your students to find other methods of getting to 24 on each card.

There is a tournament every year in May at the Aerospace Museum. The atmosphere is unbelievable! Who ever thought kids would have FUN doing math?
 

QuarterMile Math Program

I have used this drill and practice math program in summer school to test the speeds of incoming sixth graders. QuarterMile Math is appropriate for grades K-9. The problems are randomly generated and the user receives plenty of practice. There are a variety of topics to choose from at each grade level.

I have mainly used this to help the students with their times tables. The program allows you to practice up to 12 x 12. If a student is having difficulty with a certain number, say 7's, he or she can practice that particular number until they feel confident.

The students enjoy the ability to choose between a horse or race car for their race. The students are in constant competition with themselves, and other classmates, to beat their personal best time. The program keeps track of the top 5 average for each category. This allows for benchmarks for every topic. The goal is to answer the questions correctly as quickly as possible.

QuaterMile Math is appropriate for both genders and has the capibility to build confidence quickly.

Encyclopedia of Propaganda

While researching the many flavors of wiki on the net, I came across a spin-off on Wikipedia. Disinfopedia is the home of the encyclopedia of propaganda. This site was started in March of 2003, and is now home to nearly 2,500 articles. The site is laid out like the Wikipedia site but has a stronger political stance. prwatch.org is the sponsor of the disinfopedia.

I enjoyed articles on 'doublespeak' learned the difference between "martyrs and suicide bombers," but particularly enjoyed an entry entitled "Weapons of Mass Deception."

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is located in Los Angeles California and is an educational institution devoted the advancement and public appreciation of the lower Jurassic. It is geared not only to the academic looking to do scientific research, but also the general public. It gives visitors a “hands-on” view of Jurassic Technology. It puts an emphasis on the strange and unusual.


It tells the story of the Stink Ant of Cameroon. It sniffs in a fungus spore from the jungle floor which causes it to grow a large tubular formation on its back which in turn causes it change its behavior. It climbs trees, something its never done before, and sits on end of the limb of a tree until it dies. We also hear stories of bees which symbolically represent a person’s soul. Plato’s notion of the transmigration of souls holds that souls of quiet, sober people untinctured by philosophy come back to life as bees. Later, Mahomet, admitted bees, as souls to paradise. There are also several more modern stories to the same effect. The museum is chock full of such weird creatures and legends.

Degrees for Gamers

http://gamerschool.com/



So, you want a job in the video game industry? Well, you need a degree first. This university offers just that.

The University of Advancing Technology has tracks in game design and game programming for those who want to create games for a living. The courses available range from 2D and 3D game design to the "Psychology of Creativity" and "Applied Game Theory".

It will be interesting to see if more well known universities begin to follow suit, as the video game industry continues to prove itself a profitable industry and more game designers are needed to keep up with the demand.

Maryland Public Television education site provides more sizzle than steak

I came across this news release announcing Dollars and Sense, a new fun educational site produced by Maryland Public Television aimed at helping teenagers better understand money issues. Boy was I excited!

While the press release claims that Dollars and Sense was "developed in collaboration with educators and economic organizations, incorporates a hip design with interactive activities and tools to engage middle and high schoolers," the site falls way short of its billing. One "fun activity" in particular, All About the Benjamins, promises to teach teenagers about the history of money. In actuality, the lesson consists of four very trivial questions about money (e.g. Some coins are pickled before they're made.) and then a bunch of links to external sites.

One of the best "interactive" features was simply a graphically enhanced, interest rate calculator that revealed the true cost of purchases charged to a credit card.

While the graphics and web design are terrific, this site is seriously lacking in activities, real interactions or even intelligent content. I posted this to the blog because this is typical of a lot of sites that I have come across that promise interactivity, simulations and games but offer nothing close to it. It is clear that Maryland Public Television spent some money on this site (at least on graphic designers) and I'll go out on a limb a say that it was a complete waste of time and resources.

Candystand.com - the Teacher's Alternative

As teachers search for new ways of rewarding appropriate behavior and increasing student motivation, Candystand.com may serve as an effective tool. This website is so visually appealing that one visit there may cause your students to never crave the "real thing" again (not). The reverse may actually be true however, as this site's design could be blamed for creating hunger pangs. While a variety of games are available at this site, the line created around popular candy brands may be the game of choice. Candystand.com offers sports games, action games, card games, and puzzles.

So the next time you teachers want to break out that bag of candy, consider offering a coupon good for a free visit to Candystand.com. The dentist will love you and so will the teachers who firmly believe that sugar and hyperactivity have a direct correlation.

FlatWorld

FlatWorld is a project at the University of Southern California that mixes reality with an immersive virtual environment. Using rear projection screens and motion tracking, a specially designed room displays computer animation and graphics that change based on the position of the user. With stereoscopic technology, elements can even appear to move into the room. Surround sound, props, wind, and room vibrations add to the experience. The installation was designed to be easily constructed using reasonably low cost materials and equipment for simulations in the educational, military, and entertainment industries.

http://www.ict.usc.edu/disp.php?bd=proj_flatworld

WomenGamers.com

Hey ladies (and gentlemen), here is a site worth checking out! WomenGamers.com, whose slogan is “Because women do play,” aims to inform its audience of the latest industry trends and offer product reviews, game reviews, and informative gender-focused articles written by gamers for gamers. The “Reviews/Previews” portion of the site analyzes video games and gives them overall ratings of 0 (disaster) to 10 (awesome). Each review concludes with a “Marketing Efforts Toward Women” section which examines the game’s appeal to women gamers, including the effectiveness of the female characters and whether or not sexist themes are apparent. While you’re here, you might want to check out some women-and-gaming statistics.

Vortex for Windows

This simulation allows players to learn about PVA- Population Viability Analysis- a method that lets students study the process of extinction without having to travel to the far regions of the world to do so. Simulations have been run on the Florida Panther and Key Deer, Bairds Tapir, Sumatran Tiger, and Puerto Rican parrot. The variables that determine the survival of animals are population, environment, catastrophes, and harvests. Players can manipulate these variables then analyze the results. The results will detail population, extinction, gene transmission and inbreeding effects. Biology teachers could use this simulation to get students involved in learning and caring about animals and the environment.

Fun and Challenging Philosophy Games

This is a website created by the The Philosophy Magazine (TPM) and along articles on philosophical topics, it also has a section that contains 10 interactive games covering subjects as diverse as Ethics and Morality, Logic, Science and Religion. There is even a game entitled Shakespeare vs Brittany Spears. The most interesting games are the “Morality Play” and “So You Think You’re Logical”. In the former the participant answers a number of ethical and moral questions and when an answer violates the ethical consistency you have established by prior answers, the computer lets you know. At the end of the game, the computer gives you an analysis of your moral position and explains where your inconsistencies lie.

The Logic game is a set of four questions on which you test your reasoning ability. When you finish, you receive a report on how you did individually and in comparison with everyone else who has played. The computer also explains the correct answers when you finish playing.

Fun and Educational Online Games

Cooped up and don't know what to do? It can be a parents worst nightmare! Luckily, PBS Kids has a website designed to help (at least for a little while). The site offers games, music, stories, and coloring activities for all your child's (and maybe yours) favorite PBS cartoons. The best part is that children can learn while having fun. There are also links for parents and teachers. These links provide information related to the programming, and how to get the most out of it for children. Check it out with your little ones!

e-Learning Centre

While browsing the web I came across this website e-Learning Centre that contains tons of information for those interested in using games and simulations in e-learning. The website contains articles, examples and tools for anyone interested in e-learning. There are also a pretty good list of links to other centres, such as blogging, academic e-learning, e-book, games & simulaitons and many more. It's a great place to check out!

Virus simulations

While looking for existing virus simulations, I came across the MIT Participatory Simulations Site. I'll let the abstract from a student final project speak for itself:

“New technology developed at the MIT Media Laboratory enables students to become active participants in life-sized, computational simulations of dynamic systems. These participatory simulations provide an individual, "first-person" perspective on the system, just as acting in Hamlet provides such a perspective on Shakespeare. Using our Thinking Tags, small, name-tag sized computers that communicate with each other via infrared, we add a thin layer of computation to participant’s social interactions, transforming a group of people into participants in a dynamic simulation. Participants in these simulations get highly engaged in the activities and collaboratively study the underlying systemic model.”

The main MIT Participatory Simulations Site virus page

Ready? Set? Relax!

A video game designed to relax you? MindGames is using gaming technology to aid people suffering from depression or trauma. Gary McDarby came up with the idea a decade ago when he met a 12-year-old Liberian child soldier who suffered from nightmares after taking part in a firing squad. He found the boy was able to sleep better after listening to Enya on a walkman. This notion led to the design of Relax to Win, a two-player competitive racing game which is based on the players’ level of relaxation.

Sensors are attached to the player's fingers. Each player takes control of a dragon, which can walk, run, and fly. As a player relaxes, his dragon begins to walk, then run, and then fly. If the player stresses out at any point, the dragon will move back down through the cycles. The person who relaxes most wins the race.

The game features a virtual 3-D world which is designed to immerse the players, drawing their attention and making the feedback more effective. Also, Relax to Win gives constant feedback and rewards the players for achieving the correct “bio-state.”

Competitive games generally cause stress and tension. Therefore, the player must learn how to override this tendency and learn not only how to relax, but how to relax in a tense environment.

Board Game Wikis

While traipsing about the Web, I came across two wiki sites devoted to board games. The first, Seattle Cosmic, is regarded as “the first Wiki on the board game hobby.” It was developed for Seattleites who were interested in getting together monthly for Cosmic Nights to play a game called Cosmic Encounter. In addition to using the site to play games, the users discuss the games they play. Some of the wikis include topics like “Desert Island Games,” “Emergency Game Kit,” and “Gaming News.” For a look at their playing style and the way they do things, see the Seattle Cosmic Guidelines.

Board Game Geek is another site that has board game wikis. Its aim is to “gather information about the board game hobby.” Some of its wikis are “How do I know which are the best board games?”, “Blogs About Board Games and Board Gaming,” and “Where can I discuss games online with other gamers?”

I find it interesting that these wiki communities exist for people who share a passion for games. Although both sites do not seem too developed, they have been updated in the past four weeks.

The Education Arcade and the Electronic Entertainment Expo

Here's a site we should all bookmark: The Education Arcade is an international consortium of international game designers, publishers, scholars, educators, and policy makers who want to change the way we learn through computer and video games.

There's lots of stuff on this web site but the big announcement is that, lead by a group from MIT, they will host a 3 day educational games conference in Los Angeles on May 9-11 2004 as part of the Electronic Entertainment Exposition. The best news...the conference is FREE and open to the public. Topics include Are Games Educational? From Simulation to Interaction; Fostering Games Literacy; Building Partnerships Among Universities, Industry, and Public Institutions; Making Tools for Making Games; Commercial and Educational Successes; New Collaborators: Making the Next Move; Roundtables on Educational, Technical, Creative, and Market Trends.

Should we plan a car pool now?

Essential Role for Simulations in Future of e-learning

I was drawn to this blog as I researched e-learning effectiveness for another project and thought it noteworthy for our classmates. The well known author, Sam Adkins, accuses instructional designers of selling our skills as "snake oil," and feels that training, e-learning, blended learning, and knowledge management do not work.

After bashing the industry, I was surprised to see that he still views simulations as "the only viable way to deal with the affective learning domain." To support his belief, Adkins uses statistics from CyberEdge which predict that 70% of e-learning will include some type of simulation by 2006. An interesting discussion ensues as one follows the blog responses. We should be aware of this point of view and prepared to deal with it.

See the link from the 11-18-2003 posting Learning Circuits: We are the Problem: We are selling Snake Oil.

All Aboard!

Railroad enthusiasts rejoice!

The Rail Road Depot is a website that is dedicated to providing railroad and model railroad information. Within this site is a section that leads to railroad games and simulations. In the “games/simulations” section one can find game reviews about the latest in train games. Among the recent game reviews, one can find Microsoft Train Simulator, 3D Railroad Master, Train Engineer, and Train Master. This a wonderful site for those interested in railroad games and simulations and railroads in general.

Teen workplace safety game

The U.S. Department labor provides instruction for students studying workplace safety in restaurants. There are several fun quizzes on the topics of serving, clean-up, drive-thru, cooking, food prep and delivery. After studying each section in the interactive website, teens can test their knowledge by completing a Multiple choice quiz for each topic. This could be a great opportunity to motivate students to learn about workplace safety in a Health class.

Observatory Simulations

From the United Kingdom, the National Schools' Observatory website contains a number of astronomical simulations, including an orrery (An animated model of the solar system and it’s planet’s orbits around the sun), an animated explanation of what causes night and day, and where stars, the sun and the moon are in the sky over a 24 hour period, a simulation of movement of stars across the night’s sky from different locations on the earth, and a handful of other simulations.

The simulations here are all problematic, either through faulty user interfaces or a lack of sufficient explanation during the simulation.

The electric orrery would have been one of the better simulations, but it shows only a small window on the rotations of the planets around the sun. Most of the screen area is for the display of the legend, graphics indicating which planet is which in the animation.

The Day & Night and Spinning Earth simulations simply display a quick animation of the movement of the heavenly bodies. No points of reference are highlighted, no particularly note-worthy bodies are pointed out, and no explanation of what you are looking at is provided. In addition, the user interface that acts as the gateway to the animations is counter-intuitive, which would have been more troublesome were there a reasonable number of options to choose from.

In fact, the only really useful simulation of the bunch is the Life of Stars, and it doesn’t use any animation at all. Instead, the user steps through the a set of slides, each with a graphic depicting a particular point in the star’s evolution along with an explanation of that point.

Overall, these simulations suffer from animation for animation’s sake, and don’t provide useful information until the gimmickry is stripped away.

Posted by Joshua Bleier

Teach-nology

Teach-nology is a web portal that offers a wealth of sources for teachers, including interactive games for students. The super-cool aspect of the site is that if you become a paying member for $39.99 (not so cool), you can create your own games, via the website. Most of the games on the site are the virtual counterparts of old tried and true games like memory, connect four and rubics cube. Other games like word games such as crossword puzzles and mad libs are available for English gurus.

Shockwave.com

For the regular game-player, this site may be a popular venue. At Shockwave.com you can sample a variety of jigsaws, word games, action puzzles, games of strategy, card, and board games. Once you've sampled by playing, you can download and purchase the game or games of your choice.


An interesting simulation, Lemonade Tycoon, boasts of making its players "thirsty for more". You begin the game with a lemonade stand, a recipe, and a dream of becoming the Lemonade Tycoon. You read the weather forecast and the newspaper headlines to evaluate consumer trends and find the most customers. Once you buy your ingredients, set your price, you wait for sales to come in. The smart tycoon then invest profits in upgrades to improve efficiency and increase sales. At the day's end you get to see if you've reached the "Tycoon" status.

This game may be perfect for those who still regret missing their opportunity to own and operate the neighborhood lemonade stand. Might that be you?...

Games Created By Students, For Students

Surfing around the web, I stumbled upon a site for an elementary school in New Jersey who takes gaming seriously. Students at Hartshorn School have designed Webquests about all kinds of subjects- a "make up your own game" about the human body, a Wonders of the Sea Guessing Game, a Rain Forest Concentration Game, and much more. Getting kids to start thinking about game design early on can really foster the learning process.

How Do They Do It?

Ever watch a story on the news where they talk about national spending budgets? How do the president’s advisors come up with the numbers that are reported? How is it decided what stays and what goes? What goes into preparing a national budget? I always wonder about this when I hear about the many trillions of dollars that are spent on the military, international affairs, social security, medicare, agriculture, transportation, and so on. How do they do it?

The National Budget Simulation answers these questions by putting the user in the shoes of policy makers. The simulation asks users to adjust spending and tax expenditures in the 2004 budget proposed by the White House in order to achieve either a balanced budget or any other target deficit. This simulation is perfect for people like me, who “learn by doing.” I found that it is a good way to see what actually goes on behind the closed doors of the Washington, D.C. power circles.

Game Design Wiki

Wikis + Games, a familiar sounding combination, eh? I just ran across this Game Design Wiki which is taking a design patterns approach to the topic. Like all wikis, it's a work in progress but still worth checking out.

Real World Physics

When checking out the Interactive Physics page mentioned in an earlier blog, I ran across a related page, Working Model, from the same publisher that uses similar interactive modeling for more practical applications. The program applies physical principles to real-world mechanical systems and processes as an aid to prototyping. It would appear that these same simulations could also be used as training aids once a product or process was refined and completed.