Category Archives: Learning

A New Beginning (Blog Migration)

Posted on September 8, 2014 by Bart Pursel

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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Little Big Planet 2 and IST 446

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Bart Pursel

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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NASA’s foray into games

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Bart Pursel

NASA announced a gaming initiative a couple years back, and it looks like we might have our first glimpse of the results with Moonbase Alpha. A recent article describes NASA’s goal with the game: The game is a proof of … Continue reading →

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Sex education game?

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Bart Pursel

A fairly successful indi studio, Zombie Cow, recently unveiled their new effort, Privates. From their website: Privates is a funky little game about tiny little condom-hatted marines going right up peoples’ rude areas and shooting all the nasty chompy things … Continue reading →

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Directed gameplay and learning

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Bart Pursel

A colleague, Steve Thorne, has a research project underway looking at language learning inside of World of Warcraft. His theory, backed by past experiences, is language acquisition happens quicker in very context sensitive, directed scenarios. Games fall into that category, … Continue reading →

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Rock Band goes academic while Metaplace says goodbye

Posted on January 8, 2010 by Bart Pursel

The new job is keeping me very busy and I unfortunately haven’t had time to write much…at least not here. Two recent bits of gaming news caught my attention: 1. Harmonix, the creators of the original Guitar Hero game and … Continue reading →

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Wikis, games and learning

Posted on November 12, 2009 by Bart Pursel

I’ve leveraged wikis over the last 2 years for a wide variety of tasks, each time learning something new and valuable about how these platforms can be used. A few years ago, we used a wiki as a documentation repository … Continue reading →

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The design of games for education

Posted on June 9, 2009 by Bart Pursel

I typically come across colleagues and individuals with varying views on *how* a game should be designed and implemented for education. I’ve heard a wide variety of opinions on this, but some themes re-emerge frequently: Educational games should be about … Continue reading →

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Using YouTube for Warcraft Strategy

Posted on May 20, 2009 by Bart Pursel

For those of you that play World of Warcraft, this probably won’t be very interesting.  For those that do not play WoW, hopefully this illustrates some of the complexities and intricacies of the game. I’m still working on several projects … Continue reading →

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Creating Artifacts, Spring 2009

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Bart Pursel

As the PhD is rapidly coming to a close (fingers crossed), I’ve been thinking a lot about my future direction. Teaching is still at the top of the priority list. Each semester I tend to change a large percent of … Continue reading →

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