jhaas's blog

The Education Arcade and Boston-based Fablevision are collaborating on Caduceus, an online puzzle-adventure game for tweens. Caduceus exposes young players (ages 8 to 12) to the concepts of altruism and compassion, while also testing their skills of logic, reason and creativity.

In Augmented Learning, Eric Klopfer describes the largely untapped potential of mobile learning games to make a substantial impact on learning. Examining mobile games from both educational and gaming perspectives, Klopfer argues that the strengths of the mobile platform make it ideal for learning games in elementary, secondary, university, and lifelong education. 

Returning to the same well twice, learning.now blogger Andy Carvin has an interesting new post up about a panel at this year's South by Southwest Interactive (Disclosures: Ed Arcade Advisor and CMS big cheese Henry Jenkins was one of the keynote speakers at SXSWi this year and writes about it here. Less relevantly, I helped program the narrative shorts and features for the 2001 and 2002 SXSW Film festivals.).

We don't talk much policy at the Education Arcade, but during a presidential election year, it can be difficult to avoid. Currently, I find myself pretty happy with Barack Obama, but as I was excitedly listening to him give a primary victory speech in D.C. earlier this month, the dude let the air out of my tires.

It would seem Barack doesn't think too much of video games.

A quick Googling turns up a Game Politics post entitled Obama Campaign Theme: Video Games As Metaphor For Underachievement. The good folks at Game Politics pull the following quote from Obama's speech:

PBS' learning.now host and blogger recently posted this article about a new bill in Utah that would make WiFi network owners responsible for (as in "civil damages" responsible) for unsavory content that minors access through their network. Things seem to be proceeding relatively reasonably and civilly based on Carvin's post, but it's still an unnerving thought, and Carvin gets to the heart of what educators find so frustrating about filtering and limitations on websurfing:

About a week ago, The New York Times ran this piece on the growth of online schooling which I've been mulling ever since. One of the reasons we advocate for games and learning here is that they encourage social interaction and produce early opportunities for kids to work on their skills in collaboration, negotiation, and also competition. I know there are plenty of great reasons to home school your children, but I do wonder about what's lost when children don't go off to school every day, spending most of their time in one building, their home.

Oooo! A first post! I'm Jason Haas, a Researcher at the Education Arcade. My main focus is work on our collaboration with NBC News' iCue project, helping them to evaluate the design and implementation of their forthcoming educational offering. One of the projects we've worked on for them is to help develop a framework to support student journalism.

It is with interest then, that we see stories like this emerge:

MTV wants digital army to bring back the buzz

One of the things that interested me the most however was the following: