May

22

Having fun with photography: Game Day Thursday

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Photojojo presents a great page on playing games with photography. These games are intended to express and develop photographic creativity.

While these games would work well in a photography or graphic design course, they are easily transferable to your average art course. Using drawing from a book, magazine, or a portfolio, or even ones you draw on the spot you could award points for the most appropriate or most interesting responses. The competitive nature of these games is likely to keep most kids interested in them. They could be used as warmup activities to start the creative juices flowing, or full blown assignments if you chose.

Art doesn’t have to be a solo activity but can easily be competitive and done with or against other people. Since kids, especially high school kids, are social by nature, this should make art that much more interesting.

May

15

Blobs: Game Day Thursday

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I discovered the oddest game recently.  Blobs is a strangely compelling jumping game where you have a board full of green blobs that you make jump each other. The jumped blob disappears, and you keep going. The object is to end up with only one blob at the end of the level. There are 100 levels to play, with 8 blobs on level 1, and 30 on level 100.

This game is an excellent activity for developing logical reasoning skills in younger kids in much the same way chess would. However, while chess appeals mainly to a certain type of intense thinker, this is likely to have a wider appeal because of its cute green blobs and its sound effects.

The transfer of these skills to school is pretty obvious. The same type of rational, patient thinking that would make a kid successful in a game like Blobs would also be useful in Math or Science. That kind of ability to think clearly ultimately spills over into all subjects and is something that you really want to encourage.

Of course, is your school pretty to encourage logical thinking by playing video games?

May

8

Game Day: Arcademic Skill Builders

Filed Under English, Games, Math, Social Studies | Leave a Comment

Arcademic Skill Builders is an awkwardly named site that has a host of simple little Flash games that try to teach academic concepts. The games are bright, colorful, and simple suggesting they’re aimed mainly at elementary kids. A casual look at the site suggests that Social Studies, Math and Language Arts are the two subjects that receive most of the attention.

I gave a quck run through Capital Penguin where I had to make my penguin jump to the ice floe that represented the state matching the capital on the bottom of the screen. It was reasonably entertaining (though the music was annoying), but I have only one complain.

The ice floes did not have the name of the state in question, but only the two letter abbreviation. Being a Canadian and not completely at ease with state abbreviations, this led to a couple of mistakes on my part. Since the site seems to be aimed at younger kids, I’m left to wonder whether it’s most important to know the full name of a state or its abbreviation. If I had to pick one, I’d rather my students could spell out the state in full. Maybe that’s just me.

May

1

Game Day Thursday: Recycle City

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This little about Dumptown takes you to dirty, yucky looking town where you get to institute recycling programs that help tidy the place up.

The graphics are bright and colorful and there’s near constant animation as garbage trucks keep rolling by. It’s fun and attractive and seems to be designed for elementary kids.

One element of the game may make it appropriate for older kids, too. As you go to Dumptown’s city hall to set up programs to help clean up the town, you also get to see the cost of the programs. That’s one feature I really appreciate. Nothing comes free and cleaning up your neighborhood is no exception. Since we have finite resources, this extra portion could be used to help students see that if they spend money on garbage clean up that will take it away from pleasure spending, or even social spending to help the poor.

Choices are always hard, even when doing something good, and I think this game can help illustrate that.

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