My Games Design

This Guardian article on a school founded on the principles of game-based learning claims this is also "proof that games are educational". I think it's going to take more than just the school opening to support this claim though. They are starting with just the sixth grade right now but you can check out the school website to find out more. I'm intrigued but not sure I'm a fan of the school being called "Quest to learn" - too many images of warriors, Elves and magic coming to mind...

Ok, so the second conference post. The 23rd BCS (British Computing Society) HCI (Human Computer Interaction) conference was held in Cambridge last week. Anthony Dunne from the Royal College of Art began the opening keynote by asking whether we wanted to "Do you want to replace the existing normal?". Usability news has a nice summary of the talk but the gist of it seemed to be about thinking about design in terms of what could be, and how we can fit into the world, rather than in terms of what is, and how we change the world to fit us. He also presented a lot of his own and students work including ideas such as teddy bear shaped blood bags, the sentinel (below) which requires you to stare into it for a very long time in order to access your data and the cloudworks student project , which explored the idea of using nanotechnology to make clouds "rain" ice cream. It was a fascinating keynote but I can see how some people came away with the idea that this was more abou

I was going to write a single blog post titled "Conference season" since that is what the last two weeks have felt like, but I think it might get a stupidly long so I've decided to do two separate ones. I know I've been slack with the posting, especially about the games I've been playing, but now that I'm actually going to be in one place for more than a few days at a time I should be getting back into more regular posts. So, first off, was EARLI (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction) in Amsterdam where I presented a roundtable discussion at the JURE (Junior researchers of EARLI ) preconference . I'm glad the other presenter at the session was doing games related research ( Jantina Huizenga who is working on the Game Atelier project) and though it may not have been the main area of everyone who attended, it was useful to get some different perspectives on my work. I also somehow managed to win an award for "Best roundt