Posts on “ game based learning ”

BrainPOP Webinar: Martin Esterman: Games, Math Fluency and Award Winning Ways Wednesday, May 29 at 3:30 pm ET  Martin Esterman, the National STEM Video Game Challenge winner, joins us for a webinar on fluency and the Common Core State Standards for Math practice. Martin tells us why he’s decided to use games for instruction and touches on the importance of fluency in math development. You’ll see some of the games he uses to help support these skills, including Addition Blocks, the one he designed for the Challenge and is featured on GameUp. Event Password: moby

A playful, thoughtful professional development day at the BrainPOP office in Manhattan brought designers, educators and gamers together to discuss the future of educational gaming in classrooms across the country. Beginning with a presentation by Nick Fortugno of Playmatics, the New York-based group responsible for The Walking Dead: Dead Reckoning, two Breaking Bad titles, Lego City: On Patrol, Find the Future and Kingdom Keepers, we pondered how to tap into the high engagement potential and adaptable learning opportunities available within games. Noting the natural curiosity youngsters and adults alike tap into whilst exploring fictional game worlds (much like the PS3‘s adventure/art masterpiece and award magnet, Journey), Nick spoke to attendees about team loyalty and motivation through competition. Mastering in-game achievements requires skill, practice, patience and perseverance, just as learning standards in the classroom do, now defined by the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Unlike the sluggish turnaround time for multiple choice or open-ended test questions in school, games provide instant feedback to users so they may refine game-play strategy and persist. The lecture concluded with the group wondering how best to collaborate, given the rarity of serious gamer-turned-educators. Next up, BrainPOP’s Allisyn Levy introduced mathematics puzzler Lure of the Labyrinth:… Read the Rest»

Attention all New York City based Game Based Learning teacher enthusiasts! We wanted to pass along information about a great professional development opportunity.  This Thursday, May 9th, The Tribeca Film Institute along with the NYC Department of Education and the Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment,  is presenting  Gaming, Education and the Moving Image - part of the Moving Image Blueprint Professional Development workshop series.  BrainPOP is excited to join the Institute of Play, Quest to Learn, and PETLab to present sessions exploring the intersection of play, education, and the moving image.  Hope to see you there!  

BrainPOP’s Allisyn Levy shares her experience integrating assessment into game-based learning. For a long time, I was on a hunt for an amazing English Language Arts game that tied into curriculum and the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). A big part of my role at BrainPOP® is vetting games for GameUp®, our online games portal. I focus a lot on working with teachers and students to play-test new games and features so we can shape our offerings to meet our audience’s needs. For months my search continued, and for every huge handful of games we saw, only one or two were really gems. We did discover some outstanding Language Arts games, including Classroom Inc.’s TSN2, Learning Games Network’s Quandary, and many of the iCivics games, all featured on GameUp. But we started to realize that you can actually tie digital games across all subject areas into English Language Arts (ELA) using assessment. In one of my favorite student challenges, I ask the class to create a “cheat sheet” or walk-through. This involves the kind of 21st-century skills the CCSS focus on, both in terms of ELA and literacy in the content areas. Quality digital games are a powerful way to teach the formulation of evidence-based arguments, for… Read the Rest»

Seeing the (Virtual) World Through Others’ Eyes: A Game-Based Approach to Developing More Positive Relationships Thursday, April 11 at  4:00 pm ET REGISTER HERE for the webinar. Intuitively, our capacity to understand, compromise, and foster positive relationships with others should be greatly enhanced by our ability to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” In edWeb.net’s next webinar, researchers from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education will share the results of a series of studies they conducted on using a game-based virtual environment and negotiation exercise. Harvard Doctoral Candidates Geoff Marietta and Elisabeth Hahn will present their findings, which show that walking around in someone else’s (virtual) shoes does indeed encourage compromise and facilitate more positive relationships. In addition, they will explore how these studies shed light on the vast potential for game-based virtual environments to improve the many different types of relationships found in education: student-student, teacher-student, family-school, or central office-school. Join Geoff and Elisabeth on April 11th to learn about game-based approaches for helping your students develop more positive relationships. *Please note that this webinar is not hosted by BrainPOP and all professional development certificates will be issued by edWeb.net.

Beyond Angry Birds STEM Games with Research-based Evidence of Student Learning Wednesday, March 27 at 4pm ET REGISTER HERE for the webinar. Your trouble finding games that engage your students while they actually learn something, especially in STEM subjects, illustrates the disconnect between the “education” part and the “games” part of educational games. “Can we combine what we know about instructional design with what we know about game design to build games that are both really fun and demonstrably educational?” is the question being asked at Carnegie Mellon University. Join Amos Glenn and edWeb.net on March 27 to hear how the University’s experts in innovative educational technologies and its outstanding game designers are collaborating to answer that question. Amos will not only introduce you to free games you can use today in your classroom, but he also will share objective, scientific data that illustrates how these games produce measurable learning while still being fun to play-vital information for any educators bringing games into their classrooms.  Join Amos on March 27 to discover STEM games for your classroom. Attendees will also be invited to participate in CMU research at the end of the webinar *Please note that this webinar is not hosted by… Read the Rest»

Just this week, we’ve quietly rolled out a new group of support pages on BrainPOP Educators.  We have created game specific  pages to help support your implementation of GameUp games in class! Every GameUp page has a lesson ideas button. Click the button to find lesson plans, graphic organizers, videos and implementation strategies all geared toward the specific game. With unique pages for each of the almost 60 games on GameUp, you’ll find the most useful implementation content to help you begin  incorporating game based learning into your teaching! Over the last year, our goal has been to make a more friendly BrainPOP Educators experience, and reduce the amount of searching you need to do to find the resource that you want.   We hope you find these new pages useful!  We’re always eager for feedback so please leave your ideas or suggestions in the comments section below.  

GameUp keeps growing!  Just this week, we’ve introduced 5 new games, including our first music game, from partner State of Play, called One Man Band. All you do is drag and drop instruments anywhere on the screen to build a crazy contraption and create your own tune.  From partner Hooda Math we welcome another instant classic, Ice Cream Truck! This game provides an opportunity to unleash your inner entrepreneur and exercise your budget skills as you buy materials and price your ice cream cones accordingly.  Build-a-Body and Build-A-Tree are excellent interactive simulations from game partner Spongelab. Whether you are a surgeon transplanting inner organs, or a arborist designing a maple tree to survive in different seasons, these simulations put you into the shoes of knowledgeable professional!  What Plants Need, also from Spongelab, explores the combination of light, water and air that plants need to survive. We are thrilled to continue building game offerings on GameUp. Keep checking our blog and be the first to hear news about games and developments at BrainPOP!

This Thursday, January 10 at 4pm ET,  join our friends at EdWeb for a compelling webinar. Presenters: Victoria Van Voorhis, Founder & CEO, Second Avenue Software, and  Jayne C. Lammers, Assistant Professor, University of Rochester’s Warner School of Education. How do girls’ preferences in computer games vary from those of boys? Girls value the opportunity to collaborate with others in solving problems in non-violent, non-competitive contexts. These factors should be considered when designing or evaluating games for the classroom. Join Victoria Van Voorhis and Jayne C. Lammers for our community’s new webinar to learn how to incorporate games into your curriculum to engage all of your students. Join these two experts who have studied girls and gaming from diverse perspectives for the insight you need to make smart choices about games for learning. REGISTER HERE for the webinar

Can you train a dog to drool on command? Find out in the Pavlov’s Dog game in BrainPOP’s GameUp! Show your students the Conditioning movie, then let them explore conditioned reflexes through game play. The object of the game is to train Pavlov’s dog to respond to a signal that it will associate with being fed. The simulation will allow students to experience Pavlov’s findings on how animals (and humans) can be trained to respond in a certain way to a particular stimulus. You can find more information about this game on the NobelPrize.org site, or check out our lesson plan for detailed instructions for incorporating the Pavlov’s Dog game into your instruction. How do you teach conditioned reflexes to your students? Share your ideas in the comments!