just drafts

This week, I’ll be off to the ECGBL 2014 in Berlin.

Game-based learning should be designed in such a way that a) you can walk up to it and start playing and b) you can walk up to it and start learning.

The only thing this “apology” demonstrates is that Intel’s PR department is run by spineless weasels.

Two fatal mistakes the humanities must avoid at all costs: putting themselves on the defensive about their own self-worth and/or positioning themselves in the “training” camp.

Puppyblog’s long, rambling, and eminently realistic blog post about indie game customers everybody interested in gaming culture and indie games should read.

Five recommendations for critical readings on games and learning from ProfHacker.

“Maybe what we want are not ‘serious’ games, but earnest games. Games that aren’t just instrumental or opportunistic in their intentions.”

Common knowledge, and often among the main rationales for developing simulation games, is that wrapping entertainment around course material will boost motivation.

I think the peripatetics got it right.

While Gunter et al.’s paper is not a rigorously written research study, we can still extract its basic idea and expand on it.

With their often defensively positioned arguments and study designs, game-based learning proponents paint themselves into a corner.

Worth checking out. I almost missed this.

Microsoft’s never been education-centric, to say the least, and Minecraft is huge in game-based education across STEM.

When “Trust” as an educational objective has to take dynamically changing contexts into account, most serious game mechanics are not even close to being useful.

Impressive, but I wonder whether tablets are particulary suited for collaborative game-based learning (which playing games in the classroom was all about in the first place).

LEGO should be ashamed. And the whole videogame industry suffers from the same problem.

At the Joburg Serious Games Conference, Ernest W. Adams mentioned “stealth learning” as a very effective way to convey a specific message in a serious game.

just drafts is one part newsticker with commentary on game industry matters, and one part regular blog about game-based learning, education in general, and LLM/GPT/AI research in particular.