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Welcome to another post devoted to learning in the 21st Century. As you may know I have several series post I am writing at the current time. They include Digital Curriculum, Project Based Learning, and Website Evaluation. This post starts another series dedicated to Games in Education. As part of these continued series of posts I plan on a prize give away that you will be learning about in a future post. Stay tuned! This post is about more than kids playing educational games! There are a lot of great educational games and I will cover some of those in the future… with your help! In this post I am going to introduce one of at least six game creation software and sites that allow your students to create their own game! What’s cool about this… your kids get to be creators, innovators, collaborators, and contributers. Even better, it can be done in any curriculum! By the way, please take a moment to subscribe to this Blog by RSS or Email! I enjoy seeing new subscribers that I can network with! You subscriptions mean a lot to me! Also you can follow me on Twitter at mjgormans and explore my wiki of resources at 21centuryedtech.wikispaces.com. Now let’s get into the game… and have a great week! – Mike

I start this series by introducing you to a site that provides a total curriculum in game theory including design, authoring, and construction. On first visit to the site, Gamestar Mechanic may overwhelm the average educator. Keep in mind that the theory of Game Star Mechanic is to allow the teacher to facilitate. It is the students that will become the experts and collaborate with each other while providing one another with needed help. What fascinated me with this program is that it is a curriculum based on designing games as a possible career. There is also a vast amount of resources to bring Gamestar Mechanic into any curriculum. It is written for children who are in middle elementary to early high school. To get a better idea of the concepts behind Game Star Mechanic take a moment to view this informative video.

When first entering the site be sure to click on the More Information For Teachers Button (this link will bring you there). This section of the website will help you find the answers to many of your questions about how to use Gamestar in a learning environment. The site states that, “Gamestar Mechanic allows students to learn about how systems work and how they can be modified or changed. Students learn to think analytically and holistically, to experiment and test theories, and to consider other people as part of the systems they create and inhabit”. In fact you can even discover several dissertations by Ph.D by Alex Games and Ph.D by Robert Torres. Skills and concepts for student learning include:

system-based thinking

creative problem solving

art and aesthetics

writing and storytelling

STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics)

I highly suggest that you take a moment and register yourself and your school, as I did. From there you will discover both the free services and other options available under a paid subscription. Once you are registered you can set up a class and give the URL to students so they can register (free account provides for up to 200 students). Make sure you check you school AUP before putting students online. I also noted that there was an option for teacher to sign up students with out a student email account which maybe a great idea. As you read the teachers’ resources you will learn that the program can be facilitated in several ways and that the time commitment for running a Gamestar course can range from 3 to 4 hours in a computer lab to a semester-long course. Options include:

Self-guided activities and exploration: students follow the curriculum contained in Gamestar

A short course or workshop: incorporating some curriculum from the Learning Guide

A semester-long course: incorporating curriculum from the Learning Guide

The program is made up of three areas. They include the Quest. This is where students play games and learn about different components of a game. This is the starting point and certain knowledge and skills must be obtained before a student even creates that first game. Through out the Quest students earn avatars and other key objects along with the needed knowledge to build their first game. After satisfying some concept development in the Quest, students use objects earned to go to the Workshop. This is where students start experimenting with building a game. Student games can be saved and the teacher can view student progress using the class account. A third area is the Game Alley which allows students to discover games that that have been published by others. As I began my journey through the Quest I learned how even simple games are filled with challenges and critical thinking skills. It was a clear lesson in trail and error as I had to provide my own formative assessments of performance in order to find success.

What is most impressive is the Teacher Learning Guide that is provided at a comprehensive Google Site. This Learning Guide provides an amazing set of resources that allows the teacher to understand how to implement Gamestar Mechanic. That is just the beginning! Activities are provided that allow children to learn game design and story telling… and not all of them require technology! Some are just great classroom exercises allowing for communication, creativity, discussion, movement, and collaboration! Don’t stop there because some of the best is yet to come. Make sure you look at the Field Guide which is inside the Teacher learning Guide. This is the place where gaming connects across the entire curriculum. A few activities include; House on Mango Street, Ancient Blueprints, An Escher Encounter, The Great Tile Wall, The Water Cycle, Laws of the Jungle, The Slopes of Mount Everest, A Fine Balance , and They’re Quite a Pair which is an exercise in Mitosis! This is only a sample of some awesome lessons connecting gaming to the curriculum!

In conclusion, Gamestar Mechanic was created by a public-private partnership that crosses leading foundations, non-profits, academia and the game industry. It is currently supported by a partnership between the Institute of Play and E-Line Media. The game was originally developed by Gamelab in partnership with the Institute of Play and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab (AADLC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Initial funding for the game and companion learning guides came from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. I first learned about it from a session presented by another partner, the AMD Foundation. The design of this unique program is based on research by Katie Salen (Executive Director of the Institute of Play and curriculum author for the New York City Public School Quest To Learn) and James Paul Gee (author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy).

I hope you enjoyed this first in a series of posts based on Gaming In Education. Make sure you learn about the other great gaming finds along with keeping up with my continuing series that cover Project Based Learning, Web Evaluation,and Digital Curriculum. Plus, I am always sharing new finds in Web 2.0, STEM, and 21st Century Learning! Did I mention an up and coming give away? Take a moment to subscribe to this Blog by RSS of Email and follow me on twitter at mjgormans! It really is time you joined the game as we all provide the 21st century road that allows our student to become stars… Gamestars that is! Have a great week! – Mike

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Mobile, Software, Voice Recognition

Curt Woodward wrote:

Brad Bargen knows a thing or two about being acquired—he’s actually been through it five times, dating back to General Motors’ 1985 deal for Hughes Aircraft. In the latest phase of his career, Bargen is a leader in Nuance Communications’ mobile R&D hub in Seattle, one of the nation’s most longstanding and vibrant innovation centers for the wireless industry.

Bargen joined Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) in 2007, when the Burlington, MA-based speech-recognition company acquired Tegic Communications from AOL for $265 million. Through that deal, Nuance nabbed the keys to the widely used T9 predictive text technology—software that allowed mobile phones with traditional keypads to predict which words users are trying to string together.

It was a big buy for Nuance, and not the last in the Seattle area. The following year, Nuance bought Bellevue, WA’s SnapIn Software, a maker of software for automating mobile customer support, for about $180 million in stock. In 2009, Nuance bought Jott, a speech-to-text startup founded by former Microsofties, for an undisclosed sum. The Nuance Seattle team recently moved into expansive new digs near Pioneer Square, and is looking to expand again—surely one of the reasons they invited the media to drop by and say hi, which I did recently.

Bargen serves as vice president of product development, overseeing text input and customer-service efforts. He’s got an easy laugh, but makes a serious point when he reminds the team that Nuance has put a lot of eggs into its Seattle basket. “I tell people jokingly that we’re the billion-dollar site. It’s pretty easy to get to $1 billion if you start adding up the acquisitions in this building,” he said. “I remind the team of the investment made in the minds in this building, and the building itself, is just a huge commitment.”

Nuance, of course, isn’t the only shop in town counting on Tegic veterans for their core team. Mobile-software startup Swype is one of Seattle’s most-discussed early stage companies, catching the attention of investors and national media. Its product allows users to “type” on a touchscreen keyboard by sliding their fingertip from letter to letter, rather than tapping on each individual key—although Swype recently announced that it was adding old-school tapping to its offering.

Nuance has approached this from the other direction, starting with its XT9 predictive “tapping” product and adding the finger-sliding T9 Trace feature last year. This year, Nuance followed that update with the even more feature-packed Flex T9, which adds voice-to-text to the mix along with tapping, letter-to-letter tracing, and the ability to draw letters or characters in a handwriting style (particularly important in Asian markets).

During our sit-down, Bargen gave me a quick history lesson on the evolution of the T9 technology to its present forms, what he sees for the future of the industry, and the interesting work of mashing up hard-core technology with human culture by studying language around the world.

But one of the first things he pointed out was a distinction he’s noticed from working at startups on one hand, and a company the size of Nuance: The gap between invention and innovation can be large.

Bargen said he thinks of invention as essentially “coming up with something cool. But innovation is getting that out to a bunch of people so that it affects the market. You can be inventive in your garage, but it’s harder to be innovative unless you have the machine to take it all the way to the end and get it on devices and things.” And that’s a roadblock he recalls running into at Tegic.

“We could invent, but we could not innovate. We had demos, but we could never get them out there and we didn’t really have much credibility when it came to talking to OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and things about speech. But when we came into Nuance, we really started with this notion that we were going to transform the way Nuance put together products on the device,” Bargen said. “And now, …Next Page »

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