Serious Games in Mechanical Engineering Education

Serious Games challenging us to play a better future

Burden versus Fun: watch the video and have a taste of it

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Serious and Casual Games: 3 Big Game Industry Forecasts for 2007

Serious Games challenging us to play a better future

Via: Information Technology and Software Development

Three big game industry forecasts for 2007:

• “The launch of Windows Vista with the DirectX 10 graphics software will enable a new generation of graphics on the PC. That’s important because it will enable better graphics on the PC than you can get on the consoles, paving the way for a revival of the PC games business in 2007 with titles from Crysis to Spore.”

• “Microsoft has the ace up its sleeve in the console war with the upcoming Halo 3 launch. Sony will try to make up for that with titles such as Killzone 2. Nintendo will make do with fewer numbers of titles on both the Wii and the DS. If gamers embrace original new titles coming for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft cuts the price on its console, the Redmond giant could exit the year with a market share lead.”

• “Music players are entering the fray. Apple’s iPod is capable of playing games and game publishers are putting more titles on that platform. Microsoft has the Zune music and video player and could come up with a version that plays games too.”
  

A Playful 2007 To All!

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Serious Games and Education Futures

Serious Games using virtual environments in educational contexts

Via: Education Futures - Category Innovation

At mid-December's Horizon Forum meeting, Chris Dede delivered a presentation via Skype on using multiple-user virtual environments in educational contexts. These environments, he argues, allows students to co-design and co-instruct their own educational experiences, allowing for guided social constructivism and learning that goes beyond what traditional schools try to accomplish through test-based assessments.

With the pace of change accelerating, schools, by design, are not able to keep up with society. Schools are in danger of becoming irrelevant unless if they do away with reactionary, compliance-based management and build future-oriented, proactive (and preactive!) leadership

The River City Project

The River City Project, a National Science Foundation-supported simulation environment for learning scientific inquiry and 21st century skills. River City is an interactive computer simulation of a river town, based in the late 1800s, that combines digitalized Smithsonian artifacts with an inquiry-centered curriculum to engage middle and high school students.

As visitors to River City, students travel back in time, bringing their 21st century skills and technology to address 19th century problems. River City is a town besieged with health problems. Students work together in small research teams to help the town understand why so many residents are becoming ill. Students use technology to keep track of clues that hint at causes of illnesses, form and test hypotheses, develop controlled experiments to test their hypotheses, and make recommendations based on the data they collect, all in an online environment.

As we explore the website, we are free to email the Research Team at mailto:rivercity.support@gmail.com?Subject= with questions and comments or get involved.

Research 2003-2005

Studying Situated Learning and Knowledge Transfer in a Multi-User Virtual Environment

This project utilized multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) as a vehicle to study classroom-based situated learning and the ways in which virtual environments may aid the transfer of learning from classroom contexts into real world settings.

Situated learning, a major theory about cognition and education, centers on apprenticeship in "communities of practice" (moving from newcomer to expert within a sociocultural structure of practices). MUVEs are a promising medium for fostering and assessing classroom-based situated learning because they can support immersive, extended experiences incorporating modeling and mentoring about problems similar to those in real world contexts.

This project extended an educational MUVE developed with prior NSF funding; its curriculum is based on a problem-solving community in which students gain knowledge through co-interpreting data with other participants who have varied levels of skills. This project will study whether such a virtual environment can sufficiently replicate authentic contexts and multi-leveled communities of practice to provide students with classroom experiences in situated learning.

This project developed and studied multiple variants of a learning environment in which these vectors are manipulated, allowing investigation into near and far transfer. The project will develop MUVE-based curricula centered on alternative models of situated or constructivist learning and will assess their differential outcomes for student motivation and learning, as well as interface usability and classroom implementation.

The River City curriculum unit is based on students collaboratively investigating a virtual "world" consisting of a city with a river running through it, different forms of terrain that influence water runoff, houses, industries, and institutions such as a hospital and a university. River City contains over fifty digital objects from the Smithsonian's collection, plus "data collection stations" that provide detailed information about water samples at various spots in the world.

River City is typical of the United States in the late nineteenth century; it uses museum artifacts to illustrate building exteriors and street scenes from that period in history.

Content in the right-hand interface-window shifts based on what the participant encounters or activates in the virtual environment. Dialogue is shown in a text box below these two windows; members of each team can communicate regardless of distance, but in-team dialogue is displayed only to members of that team. To aid their interactions, participants also have access to one-click interface features that enable the avatar to express (through stylized postures and gestures) emotions such as happiness, sadness, agreement, and disagreement. Multiple teams of students can access the MUVE simultaneously, each individual manipulating an avatar through their computer.

In pilot implementations, each class was divided into teams of two to four students, which are "sent back in time" to this virtual environment. During their time in the MUVE, students answer questions in a Lab Notebook, which the teachers later use for assessment purposes. The Lab Notebook starts with questions that guide exploration of the environment and develop mastery of the interface, building towards later investigations that are content specific and require completing a data table or graph based on the water samples encountered in River City. The Lab Notebook asks the class to help the city solve its environmental and health problems, which are directly related to middle school science content. To accomplish this, the students must collaborate to share the data each team collects.

Beyond textual conversation, students can project to each other "snapshots" of their current individual point of view (when someone has discovered an item of general interest) and also can "teleport" to join anyone on their team for joint investigation. Each time a team reenters the world, several months of time have passed in River City, so learners can track the evolution of local problems.

At the end, students write to the mayor of River City describing the health and environmental problems they have encountered and suggesting ways to improve the life of the inhabitants. Learners are engaged in a "participatory historical situation" in which they can apply tools and knowledge from both the past and the present to resolve an authentic problem. In this "back to the future" situation, students' mastery of 21st century classroom content and skills empowers them in the 19th century virtual world.


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Child's Play: When Gamers Give Back

Not about serious games but about serious charity

Defying the stereotype of self-absorption so often attributed to members of the gaming community

Via: A Hero A Day ...

We take great pleasure in bringing to your attention the work of two of the industry's best, Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik (a.k.a. Gabe) and Jerry Holkins (a.k.a. Tycho). Defying the stereotype of self-absorption so often attributed to members of the gaming community by mainstream media, the men from Seattle answered the call of social change by starting Child's Play, a gaming community charity that donates toys to children's hospital wards throughout the country and abroad. Through the charity, Gabe and Tycho have raised over $2 million since 2003 to further the cause, enlisting not only Amazon.com to assist in generating wish lists for each participating hospital, but even industry giants--like Sony Online--who are often the objects of the men's caustic criticism.

So, even though the holidays are technically over, don't be shy about helping these dudes make the world a better place. Because playing and giving are never off-season...

What is Child's Play

Since 2003, gamers have banded together through registered Seattle-based charity, Child's Play. Over 2 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children's hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since the inception.

They collect no administrative fees or other charges, 100% of all gifts and donations go directly to the partner hospitals, to help make life a little brighter for a sick child.

This year, they have continued expanding across the country and the globe. With over 25 partner hospitals and more arriving every month, you can be sure to find one from the map that needs your help! You can choose to purchase requested items from their online retailer wish lists, or make a cash donation that helps out Child's Play hospitals everywhere. Any items purchased through Amazon or DStore will be shipped directly to your hospital of choice, please be sure to select their shipping address rather than your own.

When gamers give back, it makes a difference!

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Champlain College: Serious Games & Serious Fun

Champlain College: committed to electronic games and serious games

BURLINGTON, Vt.--Champlain College is building upon the success of some of its most innovative academic programs with the unveiling of the Emergent Media Center.

Directed by Ann DeMarle, who founded Champlain College’s Electronic Game & Interactive Development program in 2004, the Center will strengthen connections between the international game and interactive development industries, Champlain students and faculty, and businesses. The Center will advance the use of emergent media such as games, social networks, blogs and wikis for broader purposes. This includes collaborating with organizations to develop “serious games” -- games that harness technology for non-entertainment purposes, such as to enhance learning and training or to create positive change.

Champlain’s Electronic Game & Interactive Development and Electronic Game Programming degrees were among the first bachelor’s degrees in the nation modeled after the team-based game development industry. Now the Emergent Media Center will offer incubator support for student endeavors and faculty-led emergent media projects, and it will coordinate game industry partnerships and internships. The Center will also sponsor conferences and speakers and promote ties between Vermont-based and international companies.

Today, researchers and organizations are recognizing the power of serious games as an engaging teaching tool. In an October report, the Federation of American Scientists declared that video games and the skills they teach students have the potential to reshape education.

Organizations are invited to apply to the Emergent Media Center to collaborate on future projects. Projects currently under consideration include games that focus on environmental management, health care and economic development.

Champlain students have already worked on serious games: The “Mission Mercury”, created for Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

The Champlain students were tapped to create an animated video and a video game about mercury, a substance that can have devastating effects on humans and animals and is especially dangerous for pregnant women and children. This “serious game” project is believed to be the first of its kind. It was coordinated by the State of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Supplemental Environmental Project.

“We decided to deliver mercury information through an animation and game because it is a way to target an important audience -- young people -- who can be severely impacted by mercury poisoning,” said DEC Mercury Program Coordinator Karen Knaebel. “The video will cover fundamental information on mercury in the environment and the video game will reinforce that learning.”

Beyond the technical challenges they deal with, the students were faced with the difficult task of developing story lines and characters that are engaging enough to appeal to a discriminating audience of middle-school children. Part of the development process has included game testing by students from nearby Edmunds Middle School. “We had to make it hip for eighth-graders,” said Eric Sample of the Champlain faculty, who added, “This is excellent training for our students.”

“We want to keep it interesting for the kids and then they’ll come away with some knowledge,” said Amber Anger of Colchester, Vt., a Champlain College senior who was working on the animation.

“Our program is attracting clients from the ‘serious game’ side of the business,” said Ann DeMarle. “We’re capturing technology and harnessing it for a good purpose.”

DeMarle has had a long career in computer graphics that includes creating multimedia programs for AT&T, video graphics for Lockheed Martin and 3D animations and illustrations for IBM Research. Much of her work has involved the integration of education and technology. She has been the director of the Governor's Institute of Vermont in Information Technology, and she trains Vermont teachers on using technology in the classroom to enhance student learning as an instructor and mentor for the Web Project and as an organizer of the Champlain College/VITA-Learn Dynamic Landscapes program. In 2004, DeMarle was named an Apple Computer Distinguished Educator.

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Where Serious Games In Education Is Heading

Global Leaders in the use of serious games to solve learning issues

A Thinking World is a 3D gaming environment that may contain one or several tasks that you can complete to learn about a subject area

Extracts from Serious Games Source Teaching Thinking Skills Through Game Authoring

Thinking Worlds™ is an incredibly versatile and globally unique educational games authoring engine. This game allows you to play, edit, create and even share games with other members of the Thinking Worlds™ community. Thinking Worlds is based on well researched and proven learning principles and has already been used to develop highly engaging games in many subject areas.

To download a FREE copy of Thinking Worlds™ please click here . There are many examples of games created by users that can be downloaded and give you ideas of what is possible. A New Beginning has been added to Thinking Worlds, so those interested in the game can play, edit, and share it globally.

"A New Beginning" Snapshot

Chris Harte, e-learning co-ordinator at St. Robert of Newminster RC School in North East England, is one of many teachers who have trialled a game-authoring engine and found the results extremely worthwhile. Chris is an innovative and dynamic teacher, who won The National Teacher Training Agency Award for Outstanding New Teacher in 2004.

Chris became involved with learning-based games after seeing the potential of applications from Caspian Learning in the City Learning Centre at St Robert’s. He was engaged with the idea of applying thinking skills in the context of video-gaming and wanted to see what pupils could do with it.

A New Beginning

Chris and his students used Thinking Worlds, a game-authoring engine from Caspian, to develop their game - A New Beginning. The flexibility of the engine allows teachers and students to create, edit, play and share their own 3D learning based games and share them with the online Thinking Worlds community.

One of the major drawbacks of using conventional video games, and games designed specifically for the syllabus, in the classroom is that you can’t update or personalise the games’ content. Thinking Worlds overcomes this as the user can design their own games and tailor them to a specific class, group or individual.

A New Beginning was the first title to be developed using the Thinking Worlds technology. The project’s aim was to investigate thinking skills through student development of a learning video game and involved 18 students between 14 and 16.

A New Beginning is an example of where the use of learning-based games in education is heading. The future is in the development of highly personalised and specific video games. By giving students and teachers the tools to actually develop their own games that are wholly relevant to the curriculum, we are set to see a step-change in the use of educational games in the classroom over the coming years and a shift in the opinion that is currently surrounding the use of games in education.

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Serious Games & Global Kids: A World Fit for Children Festival

Serious Games challenging us to play a better future

GK is hosting the UNICEF A World Fit for Children Festival this week from December 18 - 22, 2006, at Second Life. The schedule includes voting for the favorite build, attend the dance party with Professor Henry Jenkins, and meet the judges at the award ceremony.

On the 18th, Mariel from Voices of Youth (UNICEF -VOY), shared her experiences with teens in TSL. She kicked off the event with a short interview, and helped GK give out the award for the winning team that won the highest votes for "Most Popular Build of the Day" as well as the winner from the UNICEF Scavenger Hunt.

On December 20, Henry Jenkins spoke and danced while attending Global Kids' Festival. He had much to offer on the pedagogical potential of video games and other digital media. The full audio (38 minutes) is definitely worth listening to here, or watching the short YouTube video here, especially to hear the music interspersed on the dance floor by teen DJ Alpha Z. Also, check out his new book: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

HJ - "We have to think of ways to use games not just to escape reality but to re-engage with reality. And I think that is the exciting things about the kind of work you are doing at Global Kids. It is both grounded in the virtual space and the real space. You are talking about real things, that touch real people. And you are asking people to bring what they learn here back into their own communities to make a difference. That is one of the reasons why I really believe in what Global Kids is trying to accomplish."

Highlights

• How do we expand the educational process by using video games? We need to value what goes on in game spaces.
• Youth is learning how to be part of a community through technology, how to care about issues, express their opinions, and find out what is taking place in the world around them.
• Video games and especially platforms such as Second Life, provide roles and goals for learning and information to act upon. Using virtual worlds or games to think through the experience of being a city planner, historian, environmental scientist helps to to structure knowledge.
• Second Life, is emerging as an important space for people doing a lot of important things. It is as diverse as the real world itself and people are able to try things they could never do in the real world, such as reinvent the economy and imagine new governments.

Creating disconfort with the "status quo"

• Continue to look for battles over who owns our culture. These decisions are going to determine how much we can participate in the communities that we do.
• How can we as librarians expand the educational process through video games? How are we doing this already?
• Are we valuing online participation through our policies and practices? How can we value it better? How can we get comfortable with what is 'worth' holding valuable?
• How can we create more opportunities for youth to be part of an online community?
• How will battles of who owns culture play out in our libraries and how can we inform the youth we interact with about this?

On th 21st, the second of Mariel's Voices of Youth, Global Kids Related Post", addressed "Educating and Raising Awareness Through Virtual Reality".

What is a World fit for children?
In 1990, World leaders gathered in a summit dedicated to children. In it, they made international agreements on things governments would have to do to ensure children a fair environment. Eleven years later, they gathered again to see all the things that had been done and their effects. They realised that, despite the advance in many aspects, some were still far from being what they had planned eleven years earlier. Taking this into account, they established a series of points and paths governments would have to take from then on. All of them are concerning four main issues: Education, Health, Aids/HIV and Abuse/Exploitation. This leads us to the contest - A World Fit for Children Building Contest, the biggest one in Teen Second Life so far.

What is the contest about?

In a few words, teens were required to make buildings on Teen Second Life that pretty much represent the ways these four main issues have to be addressed. They were taught about these issues in an interactive, 2-hour workshop (that was very fun, too!) They could build anything they want – from an exhibit to interactive games.

The winners will be announced today, at 4pm EST on GK Island.

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Exploring The Future Course of Serious Games

GDC 2007 TO SPOTLIGHT THE RAPIDLY GROWING SERIOUS GAMES INDUSTRY

Moscone Convention Center North - North and West exterior in daytime

SAN FRANCISCO - Dec. 5, 2006

CMP Technology's Serious Games Summit GDC (SGS GDC), the premier senior-level conference for the creators and commissioners of serious games, has shaped the agenda for the Serious Games Field with Tutorials, Case Studies, and Interactive Group Workshops.

SGS GDC, taking place March 5 - 6 at the Moscone Convention Center North in San Francisco in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference, will present game developers and industry professionals the opportunity to explore the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, social change, and more.

Moscone Convention Center North - Hall D General Session Set

New to SGS GDC this year are tutorials on best practices for low budget game development, workshops offering tactics for next-generation development of serious games, a dedicated advergaming track, and group meet-ups for key industries in the serious games space. More than 40 sessions covering areas such as learning and instructional theory, game design, business models and deals will be presented.

"The serious games industry is rapidly becoming an important and significant segment within the videogame development community," said Jamil Moledina, executive director of the Game Developers Conference. "The GDC is proud to take a leading stance in this arena and provide our attendees with the most thorough conference program dedicated to serious game development."

"The Serious Games Summit GDC is a wonderful place for the serious games community to access the world's best game developers to take control and generate new ideas, opinion, and buzz around what games and game technologies can do beyond entertainment," said Ben Sawyer, co-founder, Digitalmill, and SGS GDC content chair.

"Photo courtesy of the Game Developers Conference"

"The advisory board is focused on providing a curriculum for serious game developers to use as a platform for reflection and promotion within the greater games community to look at what we can all achieve together through gaming innovation."

Participants will have access to advanced seminars on design, production, implementation, and assessment issues related to serious games, as well as case studies on game-based solutions and simulations used within non-entertainment industries.

Additionally, they can attend the annual Serious Games Summit GDC Reception on Monday from 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. to network with game developers and industry professionals from around the world.

More than 12,500 game industry professionals, including 1,000 members of the working press, will convene during GDC, the world's largest games industry-only event dedicated to the advancement of resources, tools, and technologies used to create interactive entertainment. The GDC features more than 300 lectures, panels, tutorials and round-table discussions on a comprehensive selection of game development topics taught by leading industry experts.

"Photo courtesy of the Game Developers Conference"

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Serious Games Enhancing The Rehabilitation Environment

Serious Games promoting a breakthrough in rehabilitation medicine

Israeli Shalev Malki is among a handful of disabled patients in Israel using a virtual reality system that puts patients at the helm of a life-size video game, forces them to use atrophied muscles and teaches skills necessary to recover from severe injuries

Via the Chaim Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer and USA Today Posted 12/18/2006 7:55 AM ET

The installation of a revolutionary system has been completed at the Rehabilitation Hospital at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer.

CAREN – (Computer Assisted Rehabilitation Environment) is a multi-purpose, multi-sensory system for diagnosis, rehabilitation, evaluation and recording. It records a person's ability to balance and controls movement. The system works in real time and enables the creation of a range of experiences in a controlled environment that can be repeated using the principles of virtual reality technologies.

CAREN is made up of a moving platform, which allows the manipulation of the ground a person stands on while the motion capture system measures and records the person's movements. This places the person at the core of a feedback loop that can be predicted.

The unique characteristics of the system enable the simulation of familiar surroundings and moreover, creation of situations which do not occur naturally, for example, one in which the person controls and influences the ground he is standing on in a dynamic and active way. This type of situation requires his full concentration and a full awareness of stability, balance and movement. Thus, new possibilities that have heretofore gone un-researched open up before the researcher or the patient.

For the caregivers, this is a rare opportunity to work with the patients on new strategies of movement and balance as well as changing and improving existing models thereby diminishing the time required for an exact diagnosis and successful rehabilitation whether referring to a patient who stands on both feet, a patient in a wheelchair or fitting or adapting to a prosthesis.

Dr. Itzhak Siev-Ner, head of orthopedic rehabilitation at Sheba, said virtual reality helps his patients retrain their brains and bodies to function and works much faster than traditional rehabilitation methods.

"The system helps to strengthen muscles, to improve your stability, balance, and to translate it to everyday life," he said. "The integration of all these activities — and this is oversimplifying it — enhances the plasticity of the central nervous system."

Siev-Ner said the video game scenarios, which keep scores to allow doctors to monitor progress, distract the patient from pain and involve more complex coordination than normal physical therapy.

It is no accident that the first clinical use of virtual reality is in Israel, where a perpetual state of war has led to a constant flow of casualties.

"Unfortunately there is a quite a good industry here," said Oshri Even-Zohar, the Israeli who first conceived the system in 1990 but said the necessary computer technology wasn't available for seven years. Even-Zohar built the prototype in the Netherlands using a grant from the European Commission.

Caren Users at the University of GroningenIn 2001 a CAREN System was set up in Groningen and is since then being used for research projects

Panorama view of the lab setting in Groningen

According to Professor Shlomo Noy, Director of the Rehabilitation Hospital, "The Integrated Reality will enable simulation for patients in a safe environment, to teach them to walk and to balance their limitations of movement while receiving feedback from the system. The system is similar to any simulation system (like a pilot's) and permits a patient greater familiarity with his limitations."CAREN is a development of the MOTEK company.


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Serious Games For A Superb Wildlife Adventure

Serious Games offering gamers a breathtaking journey via Wild Earth

A safari adventure set in the heart of Africa, offering gamers a breathtaking journey through the Serengeti National Park. Players embark on various assignments, each of which feature different photographic objectives, challenging the player to explore the lush 3D world and take the best photographs of animals and environmental features. At the end of each assignment, a special article is created using the player's own photographs which provides additional in-depth information and insight.

Wild Earth -- Safari Photo Africa, developer Super X Studios, is planned to be released in 2007.

Wild Earth is a superb wildlife adventure which allows players to experience a virtual African safari. The demo is well paced and provides a great introduction to the game experience. Not many games offer a realistic virtual experience like this (particularly one that doesn’t involve guns!) and Wild Earth does is with rich realistic graphics and well formed gameplay.

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Serious Games For The 21st Century Classroom

Serious Games providing learning opportunities every second

Following my previous post Serious Games Fostering Networked Education and inspired by TIME's Cover Story: How To Build A Student For The 21st Century, posted on December 10, 2006.

TIME's Cover Story addresses quite a few challenges imposed by the rethinking of American education.

For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the "achievement gap" between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation.

This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get "left behind" but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can't think their way through abstract problems, work in teams or distinguish good information from bad.

The conversation that will burst onto the front page, when the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a high-powered, bipartisan assembly of education secretaries, business leaders and a former governor releases a blueprint for rethinking American education from pre-K to 12 and beyond to better prepare students to thrive in the global economy.

While that report includes some controversial proposals, there is nonetheless a remarkable consensus among educators and business and policy leaders on one key conclusion: we need to bring what we teach and how we teach into the 21st century.

Right now we're aiming too low. Competency in reading and math -- the focus of so much No Child Left Behind testing -- is the meager minimum. Scientific and technical skills are, likewise, utterly necessary but insufficient. Today's economy demands not only a high-level competence in the traditional academic disciplines but also what might be called 21st century skills. Here's what they would be:

Knowing more about the world

Thinking outside the box

Becoming smarter about new sources of information

Developing good people skills

The skills commission will argue that it's possible only if we add new depth and rigor to our curriculum and standardized exams, redeploy the dollars we spend on education, reshape the teaching force and reorganize who runs the schools.

I would argue in turn that all than above mentioned skills can be highly leveraged by playing games.

As stated on Mark Prensky's recent article Really Good News About Your Children's Video Games:

"Any observer knows that the attitude of today s children to video and computer games is the very opposite of the attitude that most of them have toward school. The amount of time they spend playing computer and video games estimated at 10,000 hours by the time they are twenty-one, often in multi-hour bursts belies the short attention span criticism of educators. And while years ago the group attracted to video and computer games was almost entirely adolescent boys, it is now increasingly girls and all children of all ages and social groups. One would be hard-pressed today to find a kid in America who doesn t play computer or video games of one sort or another."

"The evidence is quickly mounting that our Digital Native children s brains are changing to accommodate these new technologies with which they spend so much time. Not only are they better at spreading their attention over a wide range of events, as Green and Bavelier report, but they are better at parallel processing, taking in information more quickly (at twitchspeed ), understanding multimedia, and collaborating over networks."

"What attracts and glues kids to today s video and computer games is neither the violence, or even the surface subject matter, but rather the learning the games provide. Kids, like and all humans, love to learn when it isn t forced on them. Modern computer and video games provide learning opportunities every second, or fraction thereof."

"On the surface, kids learn to do things to fly airplanes, to drive fast cars, to be theme park operators, war fighters, civilization builders and veterinarians. But on deeper levels they learn infinitely more: to take in information from many sources and make decisions quickly; to deduce a game s rules from playing rather than by being told; to create strategies for overcoming obstacles; to understand complex systems through experimentation. And, increasingly, they learn to collaborate with others. Many adults are not aware that games have long ago passed out of the single-player isolation shell imposed by lack of networking, and have gone back to being the social medium they have always been on a worldwide scale. Massively Multiplayer games such as EverQuest now have hundreds of thousands of people playing simultaneously, collaborating nightly in clans and guilds."

"Today s game-playing kid enters the first grade able to do and understand so many complex things from building, to flying, to reasoning that the curriculum they are given feel like they are being handed depressants. And it gets worse as the students progress. Their Digital Immigrant teachers know so little about the digital world of their charges from online gaming to exchanging, sharing, meeting, evaluating, coordinating, programming, searching, customizing and socializing, that it is often impossible for them to design learning in the language and speed their students need and relish, despite their best efforts."

"An emerging coalition of academics, writers, foundations, game designers, companies like Microsoft and, increasingly, the U.S. Military is working to make parents and educators aware of the enormous potential for learning contained in the gaming medium. While edutainment, may work for pre-schoolers, it is primitive when it comes to the enormous sophistication of today's games. We need new and better learning games, and these are finally beginning to appear. Microsoft has sponsored a Games-to-Teach project at MIT which is building games for learning difficult concepts in physics and environmental science on the X-Box and Pocket PC. Lucas Games has lesson plans to help teachers integrate its games into curricula to teach critical thinking. A UK study by TEEM (Teachers Evaluating Educational Multimedia) has shown that certain games can help youngsters to learn logical thinking and computer literacy. Given the almost perfect overlap between the profiles of gamers and military recruits, the US Military uses over 50 different video and computer games to teach everything from doctrine, to strategy and tactics."

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Serious Games Fostering Networked Education

Serious Games enabling 21st century student success

Via: Networked For Learning

Networked For Learning white paper, written by ENA (Education Networks For America) with Infotech Strategies, states that while several groups have articulated new visions for education, one of the most compelling is advocated by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills: this new model, “networked education”, would make education personalized, equitable and relevant to all students.

In a 20th century geography assignment, a student is asked to memorize state capitals to demonstrate his or her knowledge of geography. But in a networked education environment, the 21st century student is asked to integrate his or her knowledge of geography with some analysis of the current political environment, communicate remotely with community leaders, organize team members and apply problem solving skills to the situation. For this assignment to be effective the student must be able to collaborate online, access resources and connect with his or her peers easily.

Schools must do far more than teach children ‘how to learn’ and ‘how to look things up’; they must teach them what knowledge has most value, how to use that knowledge,how to organize what they know, how to understand the relationship between past and present, how to tell the difference between accurate information and propaganda, and how to turn information into understanding.

But how can this model be accomplished?

Going beyond the infrastructure challenge, this model fully depends on vibrant communities. In a networked education community, the “people network becomes a connected set of valuable resources". And when communities are connected, these groups can accomplish goals that would be impossible through more isolated efforts. When leveraged properly, these networked education communities help produce breakthroughs.

In this context, massively multiplayer online serious games (MMOSGs) could be a powerful vehicle to build up vibrant communities.

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Serious Games To Monitor The Local Environment

Serious Games combining physical exploration with digital gameplay

Neighbourhood Satellites Environment-sensing adventures in the city

Via: Interaction Design Institute - Current Exhibition

Neighbourhood Satellites- Author: Myriel Milicevic (Germany) Supervisors: Ralph Ammer and Yaniv Steiner

Idea/problem/context

As we move through the city, mobile devices allow us to enjoy remote networking and immersion in personal entertainment. These preoccupations, however, lessen our sensitivity to what is happening directly around us, and often we learn about our own environmental conditions through mediated sources. What if mobile technology could reconnect us to our surroundings by observing environmental data directly, data that had been obscured from us before?

What it is

Neighbourhood Satellites are handheld sensing devices, powered by light, which enable people to monitor their local environment in a playful way, combining physical exploration and real-world data with digital gameplay.

How it works

Each satellite monitors air quality, cellular signals, and light levels. The data it collects is presented in three different modes. ‘Status’ mode simply displays the current conditions. In ‘game’ mode the satellite leads a parallel existence inside a small video screen, navigating amongst the offending pollutants to be analysed. Its orientation mirrors the position of the satellite in your hand as you capture specimens and avoid self-contamination. Greater pollution produces more challenging gameplay. You may have to go elsewhere to find cleaner air, less radiation, or more light to recharge. In ‘map’ mode the system receives data from all the other ‘satellites’ being carried by people in the area, and displays on a map their location and contamination level. Carriers might choose the cleanest path to walk or, in a spirit of risky play, purposely seek the most contamination; either way, the city’s pollution topography is dramatically plotted.

Value/Potential

Through this playful grass-roots monitoring, the presence of contaminants in a community can be known and charted by anyone. This awareness encourages a more conscious individual behaviour, which spreads cumulatively to neighbouring communities.

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EcoPods: More Serious Games from IDI

Serious Games: Tangible Interfaces for Systems thinking learning

Via: Interaction Design Institute - Current Exhibition

EcoPods - Author: Erez Kikin-Gil (Israel) Supervisors: Massimo Banzi and Philip Tabor

Idea/problem/context

Tangible user interfaces’ (TUIs) typically use manipulable objects, rather than keyboard and mouse, to interact with software operations. Systems thinking is a holistic way of looking at the world; to learn systems thinking at an early age offers children new perspectives on the world, and develops the cognitive skills needed to organize, represent and interpret how the world works. This project aims to provide children with TUIs which will allow them to understand the core principles of systems thinking at young age. It comprises a main project, Power Eco-Pods, and three smaller research explorations: Mini Eco-Pods, Light-Wall, and Eco-Sim.

What it is

Power Eco-Pods is a game program, supplied with two ‘pods’ which plug into any personal computer. It teaches children about the complex interactions of natural phenomena, thus introducing them to systems thinking.

How it works

The computer screen shows a landscape with the sun, clouds and a flower. Children hold two egg-size ‘pods’: one, representing the sun, lights up when ‘warmed’ in the hands; blowing on the other, representing wind, turns a small internal windmill. When turned in the hand, each pod moves the on-screen sun or blows the clouds. An internal algorithm mimics, in simplified form, the ‘systemic’ interaction between natural phenomena. If the wind clusters the clouds they precipitate on-screen rain but hide the sun, for instance, and too little or too much rain or sun endangers the flower’s apparent health, causing it to droop. The aim of the game is to infer the system’s behaviour and keep the flower blooming.

Value/Potential

Unlike keyboards and joysticks, tangible user interfaces introduce into game-playing the physical immediacy, bodily activity, and potential for suggesting meaning, associated with traditional toys and models. They are thus particularly appropriate for representing concrete scenarios (here the interaction between natural elements and plants) and, through this, abstract ideas (here systems-thinking concepts like feedback loops, interconnectedness and change over time). Technically simple to manufacture, the game will be mostly bought by parents and schools.

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Mobile Serious Games: BuddyBeads

Serious Games mediating social relationships via mobile

Via: Interaction Design Institute - Current Exhibition
BuddyBeads - Author: Ruth Kikin-Gil (Israel) Supervisors: Simona Maschi and Heather Martin

Idea/problem/context

The volatile drama of teenagers’ moods and relationships, combined with always-on mobile communication, creates new behaviours and reshapes existing ones. But however central the mobile phone now is to teenagers’ lives, it is not tailored to their need for a particularly intimate and emotional form of intercommunication.

What it is

BuddyBeads is a system of techno-jewellery which uses mobile telephony to share, non-verbally, simple expressions of mood or situation between group members: ‘I’m bored’, say, or ‘I’ve met a new boy’.

How it works

Each group member has an identical bracelet (or necklace or watchstrap) with a range of differently-shaped beads. The beads are of two kinds: ‘friend beads’, each representing one of your friends in the group, and ‘message beads’, each representing, according to a privately-agreed code, a specific emotion or event. Pressing selected friend beads, then a message bead, causes the corresponding bead in those friends’ bracelets to vibrate and glow. This vibration and glow are modified by the force, duration and rhythm with which your friend has pressed her message bead, allowing an additional layer of expressive variation.

Value/Potential

Wearing BuddyBeads advertises group membership, but the privacy of its codes and silent conversations reinforces the group’s identity and exclusivity. The ability to exchange mood reports and responses almost continuously (often the underlying purpose of ordinary phone calls) maintains a feeling, particularly reassuring to teenagers, of intimacy and excitement. The system adds value to a traditionally pleasurable and symbolic item, the bracelet, by fulfilling an apparently growing social need. Though here supporting the social life of teenage girls, its basic principle – using manipulable objects, rather than buttons and screens, to send and receive non-verbal data – are clearly applicable to other groups and situations.

INTERACTION DESIGN INSTITUTE (IDI)

IDI and Domus Academy unified their Interaction Design Master courses. During this year, the two individual courses took place within Domus Academy in Milan. From January 2007 there will only be one Interaction Design Master course that will sum up the know how and culture of the two prestigious institutes.

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2007 SPORE: Blending Casual and Serious Games

Serious Games with a consequence system asking you to consider your prior actions

From the creator of 'The Sims', Will Wright, comes a title where you take total control over the evolution of an entire planet's ecosystem and beyond!

'Spore', to be released late 2007, takes the natural selection theory and makes it virtual. You can create unique species that will breed with other creatures in your world, and watch them evolve into all different shapes and sizes.

“I want people to be able to step back five steps, five really big steps. To think about life itself and its potential galactic-scale impact. I want the gamers to have this awesome perspective handed to them in a game. And then let them decide how to interpret it”, says Will Wright.

Spore may be the first game to tackle consequence in a more open form. It asks you to step back and consider your actions. Making an agressive creature in the early stages will make the game different in later stages.

Another highlight of 'Spore' is its online ability – once you have developed space travel, your creatures can journey to other gamers' worlds, interact and breed with them, and develop an even more expansive universe of weird and wonderful oddballs. This feature adds a level of infinity to the game, meaning that 'Spore' is a title that will become a standard word in the minds of gamers across the world, the same way that 'The Sims' has embedded itself in the minds of PC and console users from London to Lithuania.

All the action takes place in a huge, lush world populated with creatures evolved by other players and shared over Spore's central servers. When it's ready, your one-time pond scum launches into space in its UFO on a grand voyage of discovery, planet forming, or destruct-ion! As you explore and play in this limitless universe of unique worlds, your personal Sporepedia tracks all the creatures you've met and places you've visited.

Gaming is evolving – the future is coming!

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Navy Becoming Serious Games Intensive

Increasing numbers of marines rely on Serious Games as a training medium

Extracts from the Navy League - by PATRICIA KIME, Seapower Correspondent

Increasing numbers of Marines and sailors rely on gaming as a training medium. Serious Games are not intended to take the place of field training or classroom education. Instead, game developers hope they will fill a training niche, providing an additional outlet to prepare military personnel for their jobs.

These developers and industry officials, as well as government and military personnel, met in Arlington, Va., in October to explore the applicability and future of such games. The third annual Serious Games Summit allowed producers and users to further define the role of games in public service training and education.

“Gaming is different than modeling and simulation because game developers have really put humans in the loop."

Early successes have prompted the services to consider integrating game technology with traditional simulations to give simulations broader appeal and enhance learning. At the same time, they are seen as a money-saving educational tool, providing realistic work-ups.

“Games are often graded on subjective ideas, like how cool it looks or ‘this game sucks.’ That doesn’t work for the military, which needs evaluations to ensure a game meets the training criteria".

The Navy is looking at a number of serious games to enhance training and education. It believes it has found a useful tool with “24 Blue,” a game that teaches aircraft handling officers and plane handlers how to direct planes around an aircraft carrier.

Other games under collaboration with the Navy include Breakaway’s “Pulse!,” which allows clinicians to set up specific medical cases. It can be played by medical teams before a patient arrives at the hospital. The virtual landscape actually featured in “Pulse!” is the intensive care unit at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

The Office of Naval Research also is examining serious games’ use for medical treatment and training. Researchers are studying the use of games to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and teach corpsmen emergency medical skills.

Still, PC-based games will not supplant simulators or training exercises. As popular as some are, they are not substitutes for hands-on experience.

Being relatively low cost and attractive to much of their audience, serious games and the techniques they employ to grab and keep users, including state-of-the-art graphics and carrot-and-stick reward systems, are likely to push innovation in military training and operational planning.


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More on Serious Games Meet Medical Education

Serious Games meeting medical education or MedGames

Jeff Hazelton, president of BioLucid, combines "Toy Story"-like animation with medical science to produce medical animations and interactive medical education for the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries

Fantastic Voyage

At first Jeff Hazelton thought he'd be a doctor when he graduated in 1993 with a degree in biology from St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, but he enjoyed his art classes so much he decided to try to paint for a living. After a two-year adventure, sailing halfway around the world with two friends and selling his paintings for $50 and lunch, he ended up as a DJ in a New Zealand bar. It didn't take long before he decided it was time to head back to his parents' home in Venice, where he married his passion for art and science in the new field of computer animation.

Entirely self-taught in graphic design and animation, today Hazelton, 35, is the president of BioLucid Productions, the medical animation company. He is helping local biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to explain how an advanced technology or an experimental drug works through the use of 3-D animation.

The same animation software that helped special-effects wizards work Hollywood magic in The Matrix and the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy allows Hazelton and his team to transform cells and drug molecules into stylish performers.

A BioLucid animation shows cells forming new blood vessels to feed a tumor

"When you look at these two industries – biotech and visual effects – they are both exploding with technological innovation," said Hazelton. "We try to put them together in a way that is mutually beneficial.
"The researchers bring to us the science, we bring in the animation and the art of telling a story, and that synergy is what makes it work."

Why Use Medical Animation?

Because quality medical animation is proven to be the most effective way to educate an audience about how complex medical technology works and because YOUR educational or marketing message will be remembered better and longer with a visual stimulus. Think of your own memory. Which do you remember better, sights, or sounds? Our brains retain visual images and messages much longer and much more accurately than audible or text messages. BioLucid Productions specializes in communicating complex ideas through the powerful and remarkable art of medical animation.


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Serious Games Meet Medical Education

Serious Games meeting medical education or "MedGames"

Via: Bio Lucid Productions - Video Gaming and Education

Date: November 5, 2006

Award winning medical animation studio, BioLucid Productions, has ushered in the mainstream use of interactive 3-D video game technology for medical education and marketing purposes. According to BioLucid Productions, Medical Gaming, or "MedGames" merges the entertainment and thrill of 3D video games with the world of medical education and medical marketing. Having produced several successful medical games in 2006, BioLucid is focused on becoming the industry leader in this new medium."

The Medgame is a dream come true for myself and BioLucid Productions" stated Jeff Hazelton, Founder and President of BioLucid Productions. "I am a video-game enthusiast and of course, I love medical science and animation. I never thought until a few years ago that these worlds could come together to create such an entertaining and educational product. The Medgame has become the way for medical technology to stand out at trade shows and web-sites."

Since the success of its latest MedGame at Digestive Disease Week in Los Angeles, BioLucid Productions has opened a new technology development site in Eastern Europe. "The new development center allows us to work on, AdverGames and MedGames, around the clock and we need that extra time and technical resources to create the most engaging games in the business. Making a high quality, custom, interactive 3D Medical Game is a complex endeavor and the additional capacity and programming knowledge was needed."

Medical games have just started to appear on the medical tradeshow floor, and they are proving to be extremely effective. The experience at DDW was a testament to this with over 2000 physicians taking the time to play through the MedGame created for Elan pharmaceuticals. BioLucid Productions goal is to do for MedGames what they did for medical animation in the early part of this decade. BioLucid wants to bring Medical games into the mainstream, so that pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies can make MedGames a staple of their promotional efforts.

BioLucid Productions is a proven leader in 3D Medical Animation and a pioneer in the area of Interactive Medical Video Games, or MedGames, for medical marketing and education. BioLucid Productions is based in Sarasota, Florida and strives to make complex biotechnology and pharmaceutical technologies easily understood through the power of medical animation and interactive entertainment. BioLucid Production clients include Fortune 50 Pharmaceutical companies, small cap biotechnology, medical advertising agencies, medical education companies and medical groups.

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Serious Games: Educators Explore Second Life

Serious Games challenging us to play a better future

Extracts from CNN.com - by Grace Wong

The classroom of the future isn't on a college campus. It's in the virtual world of "Second Life."

A growing number of educators are getting caught up in the wave. More than 60 schools and educational organizations have set up shop in the virtual world and are exploring ways it can be used to promote learning.

The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community, said Rebecca Nesson, who leads a class jointly offered by Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School in the world of "Second Life".

"Students interact with each other and there's a regular sense of classroom interaction. It feels like a college campus," she said

She holds class discussions in "Second Life" as well as office hours for extension students. Some class-related events are also open to the public -- or basically anyone with a broadband connection.

The growing adoption of broadband Internet connection has helped drive that trend. Some 42 percent of Americans have a high-speed Internet connection at home, up from 30 percent last year, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Besides improving the quality of distance learning, educators are finding "Second Life" is a good way to introduce international perspectives. In Nesson's course, students as far away as Korea engage in the classroom discussion and work on team projects.

Flying distractions
"Second Life" isn't without its drawbacks. It can be distracting to have people "flying" above you while you're trying to concentrate on a classroom discussion, said Brien Walton, 40, a master's degree student in educational technology at Harvard who is taking Nesson's course.

("Flying" and "teleporting" are two ways of navigating around the online digital world.)

Distractions aside, there's huge potential for the field of education in "Second Life," according to Walton, who in addition to being a student runs a company that develops distance courses for educational institutions and corporations.

Most people think online learning doesn't require participation or engagement with course material, he said. But in "Second Life" there's real-time interaction, which means students need to engage in the discussion -- much as if they were sitting in a brick and mortar classroom.

John Lester, community and education manager at Linden Lab, the creator of "Second Life," echoed that view. "There is a real human being behind every avatar -- the people are very real. It's just the medium is different," he said.
San Francisco, California-based Linden Lab develops the infrastructure for the online society, but it's up to its virtual residents to develop the content in the community.

That's one of the reasons some are skeptical about how much of an impact "Second Life" will have on the educational landscape.

"'Second Life' on its own doesn't force anyone to do anything," said Marc Prensky, a leading expert on education and learning. "It's a blank slate, and whether it develops into a useful tool depends on what sort of structures are created within it."

While it remains to be seen how much of an impact "Second Life" will have in the long run, there is immense interest within the educational community to find ways to harness its potential, said Mechthild Schmidt, a professor at NYU-McGhee, a division of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies.

Schmidt, who learned about "Second Life" from her teenage son, integrated the virtual world into a course she teaches on digital communication to give students a new avenue for collaboration.

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Serious Games: A Walk On The Virtual Side

Serious Games landing in Second Life

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Extracts from Forbes.com - by Elizabeth Corcoran

Second Life, created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, is both easy and difficult to explain: Science fiction fans will recognize it as an attempt to create the visions of cyberspace described in novels by authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Another explanation: It’s a video game, like World of Warcraft or Grand Theft Auto, that lets players wander around doing whatever they’d like.

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

It is easier to describe Second Life’s growth: Very fast. Second Life went live in June 2003. Last December, it had 92,000 users, and about 4,200 typically played at one time. Now the site has topped a million unique customers and on Sunday crossed the threshold of 18,000 users at a single time. Half are from outside the U.S.; almost 44% are women.

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Those numbers are still tiny compared to Google's (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) YouTube or News Corp.’s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) MySpace, to name the two most prominent growth stories of the second tech boom. But the buzz about Second Life is growing even faster than its user base.

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Part of that growth stems from Second Life’s virtual economy, which theoretically lets users make money by buying and selling items and land in cyberspace; last week, a user claimed to have become a real-life millionaire based on her Second Life exploits.

Although in practice it might be hard for a single person to walk away with that big a check, users are steadily turning their Linden dollars into real ones. In October, for instance, Linden Lab paid a total of 917,000 real dollars to users in exchange for their virtual ones. Since October 2005, the company has paid out 6.8 million real dollars.

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Marketers love Second Life, or at least the idea of Second Life, as well. About 40 real-world companies have established beachheads, more for pumping up the “cool” factor of their brands than for moving real products. Sony BMG, the music label jointly owned by Sony Corp. (nyse: SNE - news - people ) and Bertelsmann AG, has a spot where musicians perform. In November, IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) and Dell (nasdaq: DELL - news - people ) opened big sites; the president of Nintendo of America has been making the rounds as well.

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Overall, visiting Second Life is a kinder, gentler experience than, say, playing the even more popular World of Warcraft online multiplayer game, which boasts 7.5 million users. There’s no question it’s great fun to custom-design oneself. But it’s a place that demands commitment, much like moving to another country means learning a new language and customs.

Copyright 2006, Linden Research, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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BEEweb Serious Games: Free Tutors For Every Student on the Planet

Serious Games turning kids into each other teachers

Professor Jordan B. Pollack directs a research lab called DEMO-Dynamical & Evolutionary Machine Organization, at the Computer Science Department of Brandeis University.

BEEweb is his biggest vision ever - free tutors for every student on the planet! Thousands of students who drive each other's learning.

BEEweb is a serious games project based which is focused on k-8 multiplayer educational gaming using a new kind of motivational structure. It turns kids into each other teachers and can scale P2P to millions for free. They have 4 games so far, won 3 "Bessies" and have more on the way. They plan to launch Melobee in the spring (music appreciation/composition/listening) and Historbee by summer.

GeograBEE is a really fun way to learn geography of the United States where two players challenge each other with questions like "Where is the state of Texas?" You can even call up a friend and play GeograBEE with them! Learn more...

PatternBEE is a fun game where two players challenge each other with geometric puzzles using a rare version of Tangrams. It is fun and challenging, and build skills in geometry, spatial rotation, problem-solving and creativity. You can even call up a friend and play PatternBEE with them! Learn more...

MoneyBEE is a fun game from the creators of SpellBEE where two players challenge each other to solve coin problems, like "Which two coins add up to 30 cents?" It helps develop arithmetic, algebraic and scientific skills, and, besides, its really fun! You can even call up a friend and play MoneyBEE with them! Learn more...

BEEweb educational multi-player communities harness the Internet to provide every learner with a human tutor who can deliver individual challenges using real-time assessment.

Supported by scientific discoveries made while studying dynamics of complex adaptive systems, BEEweb has developed a new kind of educational technology based on a non-competitive incentive that effectively turns peers into teachers.

DEMO attacks problems in agent cognition using complex machine organizations that are created from simple components with minimal human design effort. They study recurrent neural networks, evolutionary computation, and dynamical systems as substrates.

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Serious Games by Global Kids: Bridging Virtual and Real Worlds

Serious Games bridging virtual and real worlds

Via Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative

First, the event in the real world -- Our Walls Bear Witness

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum projected wall-sized images of the genocide in Darfur onto its facade every night during the Thanksgiving week, marking the first time the national memorial's exterior was used to highlight contemporary genocide. The photographs are drawn from the work of some of the world's premier photojournalists, including VoGP guest, Ron Haviv.

The event in virtual world -- U.S. Holocaust Museum's Darfur Photos on Camp GK

A version of the museum, and of the photos, have been created in the main grid. Those folks were kind enough to give us a copy, with the help of Claudia Linden, and they are now on display on Global Kids Island.

A number of teens built objects to support the event. nik385 Doesburg helped out a lot, amongst other things building a rotating globe with an arrow pointing to the Darfur region of the Sudan.

Along with a video from the opening ceremonies at the U.S. Holocaust museum, GK ran a second screen with a student project about Darfur from TSL resident Aesop Thatch.

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