{"id":272,"date":"2012-08-28T15:10:44","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T14:10:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/?p=272"},"modified":"2012-08-28T15:10:44","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T14:10:44","slug":"playthinklearn-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/playthinklearn-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"PlayThinkLearn Redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

Updates to this blog have been notably inconspicuous over the past eight months. This is primarily due to the arrival of Offspring #2 back in January, compete with sleepless nights, more poo than I care to remember, and general child-related chaos. If in doubt, blame the baby.<\/p>\n

Well, I’m finally back; bigger, better, bluer, and with 100% more beavers (long story, see here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It’s difficult to know where to start: so much has happened in the world of games and learning since the start of the year, and I’ve missed most of it being elbow-deep in infant sick. However, lists are always a good place to start; so here goes…<\/p>\n

Five things that I saw in the past year, and meant to blog about, but never round to (in no particular order):<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Blockly<\/a>. I did some work on languages for teaching programming at the end of last year, and found this interesting, particularly the maze example (which – to my shame – I still can’t solve). One of the problems with teaching programming is meaningful problems, and I love the way that this demo integrates the puzzle with the means of solving it (reminds me a bit of the wonderful Bytes Brothers<\/a>).<\/li>\n
  2. The lovely people at Popcap Games have always been super-helpful when I’ve needed permissions or images, and it was great to read this recent article about the ten secrets of casual game design<\/a>. I think that the educational game design community has a lot to learn from casual gaming, and I love lists. All good.<\/li>\n
  3. The Gamification of Education Infographic<\/a>. Personally, I think that ‘gamification’ is getting far too much prominence over the ‘games-as-constructivist-learning-spaces’ idea, but I have to admit that the former is just a little bit more catchy (therein lies the problem). However, I do like visual ways of expressing stuff, and this provides a nice overview of the gamification world (albeit a world that only contains America).<\/li>\n
  4. Digital Ninja<\/a>. Okay, now this is long past, but I still think it deserves an honourable mention. This was a video created for the JISC Elevator experiment for crowd souring ideas for funding, by a group from the ALT Games and Learning SIG. It didn’t get funded, but I still think it’s brilliant (and it did get the requisite number of votes in the fastest time). I think there’s still a lot of mileage in this one.<\/li>\n
  5. Tiny Zoo<\/a>. It’s boring, repetitive, trivial, and completely pointless. Yet compelling. And did I say boring? Really boring. So why am I still playing it three months after installing it to ‘see what all the fuss is about’? I haven’t spent any money on it (yet), but I’ve been tempted (and I know some very clever people who have parted with real cash for zoo dollars). There’s definitely something going on here that warrants further study. Offspring #1 just loves the zombies.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Updates to this blog have been notably inconspicuous over the past eight months. This is primarily due to the arrival of Offspring #2 back in January, compete with sleepless nights, more poo than I care to remember, and general child-related…
    Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71sY0-4o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":278,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}