Category Archives: Games

A New Beginning (Blog Migration)

After years of virtuallearningworlds.com being hosted by hostmysite.com, I’m migrating over to our University’s WordPress install. I often neglected the upgrades to WordPress when managing my own install, so I’m hoping by offloading the work I can get back to … Continue reading

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Gaming and Accessibility

A very important topic at our university is accessibility, particularly web accessibility. So much of our information today is online, it’s critical that it be available in a usable format to the widest possible audience. Factor in Penn State offered … Continue reading

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Lego Universe Closing

Unfortunately, Lego Universe announced it’s closure on 1/31/12.  While never having played the game, I am disappointed by this announcement because, from most accounts, the game was generally well received.  The game received praise by how accurate it re-created the … Continue reading

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Orcs and Scaffolding

It’s really no secret that games are great at scaffolding.  Video games, at the most basic level, are nothing more than very complex pieces of software.  You, the gamer, need to learn how to operate (in this case, play) the … Continue reading

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Rhythm Gaming with Pulse

I recently downloaded Pulse, a rhythm game from the same group that made Auditorium (free web game, very interesting).  This iPad game basically revolves around several songs, where you tap various beats that rotate around a circle.  The catch is … Continue reading

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Gamification of Khan Academy

The group I work with, the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence, recently started taking a look at Khan Academy, a large collection of educational videos covering a massive amount of content.  Some faculty have helped us with this effort, and … Continue reading

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IST 446 Prototypes

Some of my students sent me descriptoins and screenshots of their games from the Spring 2011 section of IST 446 that I taught.  Overall, I was very pleased with the course and received a lot of great feedback.  When I … Continue reading

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Games that Change Behaviors

One of the primary reasons educators get excited about video games is the ability of games to change player behaviors.  From an educator’s perspective, changing behaviors is one of the most difficult challenges we face when, say, we teach a … Continue reading

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Little Big Planet 2 and IST 446

This semester, I’ll be teaching a course on game design and development, IST 446.  The primary assignment (or rather, string of team based assignments) takes teams of students through the inception, design, iteration and prototyping of an actual game.  Or … Continue reading

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The changing landscape of gaming

I continue to be MIA a great deal and apologize for those of you still poking in from time to time.  Due to a shift in jobs, I’ve had less time to spend on games and more time data mining … Continue reading

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