Posts tagged with education

Submissions are being accepted for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, an opportunity for students and educators to flex their creative muscles and share their original video game concepts.The competition is divided into four categories: Middle School, High School, Collegiate, and Educators. The general goal of the competition is to motivate interest is Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM).Submissions will be accepted anytime between November 15th - March 12.

A new game called Planet Hunters, set up by a list of organizations including the University of Oxford and Yale University, enlists the help of gamers to seek out new civilizations. Or at least discover potentially new planets, by searching through NASA Kepler public release data. According to Gamasutra's article, "Every user who helps to discover a planet is then named in the acknowledgements as part of The Royal Astronomical Society monthly notices." The official report explains more of the details.

Online gamers have used a game called FoldIt to help decipher "the structure of an enzyme of an AIDS-like virus," helping scientists to develop "new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs. "While the enzyme had "thwarted scientists for a decade," the entire process took the online gamers only about 3 weeks to crack.

University of Michigan psychology professor Susanne M. Jaeggi was quoted today in an L.A. Times article about research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that explored the possibility of certain video games improving the reasoning and working memory ability of children who play them.

Authored by Ben Nanamaker: Some of you may remember playing some version of the Carmen Sandiego series of computer and video games that were popular in the 80s and 90s. Others might better remember the PBS tv show "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?", if not for the content, then for introducing the world to Rockapella. Well, depending on your opinion of Facebook games, I have either good or bad news for you.

The game Bibliobouts, created by SI students from the University of Michigan, is getting more press as they prepare to be released for classroom use for the Winter 2011 and Fall 2011 semesters. Bibliobouts is "an online social activity that teaches players the skills they need to research academic papers," and can be used across disciplines.Read more about it here, or check out the demo here by entering demo@bibliobouts.org as the email address and "demo" as the password.

An article on the UMHS website explores how and why video games might help the new generation of medical students to excel in their preparations for becoming doctors - everything from helping them to choose their specialties to helping them learn how to perfect surgical incisions.

Today's Michigan Daily (the student newspaper) has an article about the class Education 222: Videogames & Learning, taught by Prof. Barry Fishman (who is on our advisory committee for the archive): "Gaming in the classroom? New class says yes."

With this blog I hope to not only talk about our upcoming Computer & Video Game Archive here at the MLibrary, but also document my exploration into the relatively-new-to-me world of games in the academy. First up is The Education Arcade at MIT.