aReason2/Crystal Davis
Saturday, July 24, 2010
BP8_Platogo
Platogo is a social networking Flash gaming site. It works like this. You upload your flash games and then add friends, challenges, rewards, and level editor components. Compare you’re your scores to friends, challenge them in game play, give rewards and edit one of your game levels with the level editor.
For a wider audience for you games you can share them with the entire Platogo community and/or get even more exposure by loading them on to Facebook using the Platogo guide provided. This manual is straightforward and gives you step-by-step instructions on how to that.
To broaden my student’s perspective on Flash games, I’m going to have them play and evaluate games on Platogo. It always helps to see how someone else puts something together because you get ideas of how you can make it better or different. Also, you might say, “Wow, how did they do that?,” which gets curiosity and creativity going. It makes you want to figure out how they did it.
My online gaming students are going to be excited about this site, but I’m going to check it out further to see if I can create a private Facebook group that they can load their games to. Furthermore, I’ll need school and parent permission.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
BP6_commentJenAlman_fromCrystalDavis
I've used bubbl.us for concept mapping but haven't used cMapper. Follow this link to my comments on Jen Alman's blog.
BP5_commentJessicaGoodenowFromCrystalDavis
Jessica Goodenow has taken a look at GoAnimate to see my comment on her blog just click the word link!
BP4_Wikispaces
Wikispaces.com is a fabulous, free educator Web 2.0 tool since it has a private members only option, easy creation of student accounts, effortless posting of various media, and site customization. Creating your wiki is straightforward and making it private is just a click of a radio button. Inviting your students and creating their accounts is painless because you don’t need their email addresses. In my case this is important because I’ll have 192 students in the Fall. Yikes! Did I say that out loud? I like the idea of customizing the way my wiki looks by choosing the theme and colors I want to give it that personal touch. It allows posting of files, images, videos and other media. Additional awesome features include as many wikis as you need or want, infinite storage, and across wiki administration or site admin.
Finding a way for my online students to collaborate can be challenging, but Wikispaces will solve some of that by providing a safe online environment where students will rate the games they play, comment on other student’s game ratings, and learn from each other. Furthermore, it allows me to track or monitor each student’s post with an email notification system. That makes it practically trouble-free for me to check what each student is doing and be able to address any concerns I have right away.
In a couple of minutes I had my Game Design Wiki setup and with another a couple of hours I’ll have an amazing wiki to share with my students. The interface is fantastic! There is a great “help” section, FAQ area, wiki walk through or tour, and a link to educational wikis’ to see what other educators are doing.
Friday, July 2, 2010
BP3_yoyogames
GameMaker (http://www.yoyogames.com's game engine) is an excellent 2D game engine that is easy to use and a free download. Students can create educational or learning games for any assignment you choose. First, students should play educational games from yoyogames to get the idea. Here are a few examples to checkout to see the potential: MissleMath (squareRoots), Euromap, Halo Math, Cell-Abration, and Mental Playground. Some of the games above were created as student school projects! Isn’t that great? There are tons more, but keep in mind you need to download these on a PC to play them and to use GameMaker.
Also, you can have your students play other Educational games from FunFlow: Arithmetic Challenge, Flags, Da Vinci Cannon (trajectory), Typing Challenge, Skill Test, Brain Test, Countries, Globe Trotter XL and Construction Fall (trajectory). These can all be played on a PC or Mac and they are standalone applications. The screenshot above is from http://www.yoyogames.com.
Second, students rate the educational games they played on yoyogames and/or FunFlow. This is important because students will learn what they like in a game, peaks their interest and engages them. Yoyogames has a great rating system for their games and I would suggest that you have your students use that system. Be sure to let them know, if the game they played was fun then it will probably be fun for others. Also, stress that the goal of an educational game is to make it fun while you learn.
Third, students download GameMaker for free by clicking “Make” at the top of yoyogames and then the download icon. This step shouldn’t take very long. After that you have students do these two tutorials – “What makes a good game?” and “Your First Game.” You can find these by clicking “Make” and look to the left for “Tutorials” or just put the word “Tutorial” in the yoyogames search tool. These two tutorials will get the student familiar with the GameMaker environment.
Finally, your students are ready to create their first educational game with your guidance. They will need to create a game plan: subject (Math, Science, English, History), title, idea of the game, and images needed. Don’t forget to mention copyright law! After that they will build their game in GameMaker. You’ll be amazed at what your students come up with!
Note: GameMaker is for PC only, but if you want a Mac alternative
( http://developer.apple.com/games/gameenginesonmac.html ).
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