educational game

POX: SAVE THE PEOPLE® is a cooperative board game that challenges 1–4 players to stop the spread of a deadly disease. Not only is the game fun, but through play, players understand group immunity and the need to vaccinate. Many public health groups need to better promote immunizations in order to continue to prevent vaccine preventable diseases. Vaccinations against deadly diseases such as diphtheria, polio, and whooping cough were standard public health measures: kids today don’t worry about getting polio, for example. Due to suspicions about vaccines and links to other diseases, more parents refuse to immunize their children, which could lead to a national health crisis. Parents have misconceptions about vaccination. For example, some parents believe that vaccines are no longer necessary. This belief may stem from the idea that children develop immunity to diseases automatically through time, which is simply not true; these myths can lead to disaster. For example, whooping cough has reemerged in the United States. As the percentage of people vaccinated against whooping cough has decreased, the U.S. has lost “herd immunity” to whooping cough, thus allowing ways for contagion to spread among the populace. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/pox/)

Tiltfactor is delighted to be able to share some design methods with the public. Developed as part of the Values at Play project, the Grow-A-Game cards are widely in use in both K-12 and University classrooms. Using Grow-A-Game, groups of people brainstorm novel game ideas wich prioritize human values. While no prior game design experience is necessary, both experienced designers and those new to the field will have fun making games. In response to consumer demand, our team has created three distinct sets of the cards, with each version designed specifically to meet the needs of a particular user group. Apprentice, designed for 10+ beginners, as well as educators to use in classrooms and after school programs, focusing on digital game examples; Classic, designed for general users or those without much experience with digital games who are interested in exploring values-conscious design; Expert, geared toward advanced students for expert designers. This version is intended to complement more conventional brainstorming methods and without example games to modify. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/grow-a-game/)

Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive is a Twine game that invites the reader to become physically involved through marking up their own body with symbols throughout play.
As a Twine game, the work relies primarily on text and audio along with backgrounds of shifting colors to draw the player into a disturbing science fiction landscape. The game opens with a level of customization that invites the player to become connected and even embedded into the game, choosing their month of birth, element, and eye color.
As the player becomes a servant to a monstrous larval queen, the stage is set for a dystopia of dream-like and vivid yet mundane violence. After playing, the reader has a tangible record of their own choices and identity beliefs in the drawings on one’s skin.
It's inspired by mob violence, trash struggle, C-PTSD, and child abuse. It's also inspired by friendship between trash girls. In most media there’s an unspoken belief that feminine lifeforms can't survive on their own, can't have spaces of their own, can’t have relationships of their own. The author try to go against this with basically everything she make.

(Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=with-those-we-love-a…)

IVANHOE is a pedagogical environment for interpreting textual and other cultural materials. It is designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which we understand and study humanities documents. An online collaborative playspace, IVANHOE exposes the indeterminacy of humanities texts to role-play and performative intervention by students at all levels.

While we often refer to IVANHOE as a ?game,? it is important to understand that the concept has broader implications for humanities pedagogy and research, and that many modes of sophisticated, scholarly gamesmanship are possible in the IVANHOE environment. The ?rules? of the game are up to its players and initiators. IVANHOE can foster both competitive and collaborative interaction, well suited to research and teaching.

No, really: what is IVANHOE?

In simple terms, IVANHOE is a digital space in which players take on alternate identities in order to collaborate in expanding and making changes to a ?discourse field,? the documentary manifestation of a set of ideas that people want to investigate collaboratively.

Conceived at SpecLab and developed by ARP, IVANHOE was released to open-source developers under an Educational Community License in late 2006.

(Source: http://www.ivanhoegame.org/?page_id=21)

Re:Activism is an analog game with direction provided through SMS and cell phone technology. Players race through neighborhoods to trace the history of riots, protests, and other political episodes in the history of New York City. Teams pit themselves against the clock and test their puzzle-solving skills to locate important sites representing acts of civic engagement and struggles for greater social justice. Activated by text messages from Re:Activism Central, teams reaching target locations respond to site-specific challenges that reinforce the historical content. Players must also activate strategic thinking by choosing to focus on racing or puzzle-solving, or a combination of both, to win points and become the most-active activists to win the game. Re:Activism was initially developed for, and first played during, the Spring 2008 Come Out And Play Festival. It has since been documented online and adapted into a downloadable kit to encourage redesign for use in other cities.

(source: Website PETLab)

Prom Week is a social simulation game being developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In Prom Week the player shapes the lives of a group of highschool students in the most dramatic week of their highschool career. Using our sophisticated social artificial intelligence system, Comme il Faut, Prom Week is able to combine the dynamic simulation of games like the Sims with the detailed characters and dialog of story driven games. (source: https://promweek.soe.ucsc.edu/)

Redshift & Portalmetal asks: as climate change forces us to travel to the stars and build new homes and families, how do we build on this land, where we are settlers, while working to undo colonization? The story uses space travel as a lens through which to understand the experience of migration and settlement for a trans woman of color. Redshift & Portalmetal tells the story of Roja, who's planet's environment is failing, so she has to travel to other worlds. The project takes the form of an online, interactive game, including film, performance and poetry.

In short, the ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format for archived chess games) and outputs a poem. The poems are based on 12 source poems I wrote, 6 poems for the white pieces, 6 poems for the black pieces: there is a 64 word poem for each colour’s pawns, knights, rooks, bishop, queen and king. When a piece lands on a square it triggers a word from the source poems and the translator compiles them together and outputs a poem. For more, see http://chesspoetry.com/about/about/. The site itself includes a translator capable of inputting any chess game in .pgn format as well as a playable version that combines the translator with a chess-playing AI. In my performance I play a game versus the ChessBard on chesspoetry.com and project it and the subsequent poems that are translated in real-time. I imagine the performance being similar to demonstrations of The Turk, a chess-playing automaton from the 17th and 18th centuries: I would play at physical board with a chess clock, sitting down and ideally on a raised stage, and move actual pieces; I would then enter my moves (and see theChessBard’s in response) in a monitor-CPU next to me that would be projected behind me. The performance would last as long as it took me to finish the game, though I would set a time limit with the chess clock.

(source: ELO 2015 catalog)

When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.

Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities. As a step towards conveying richer identity experiences, we introduce our interactive narrative game called Mimesis, which aims to allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. The story of Mimesis takes place in an underwater setting with subtly anthropomorphized sea creatures as characters. The player character is a mimic octopus, which is a species of octopus adept at emulating other creatures. The octopus is on a journey that takes it from the dark depths of the ocean to its home in the tropical shallows. Along her way, the octopus will encounter several sea creatures who inhabit the waters and whose actions serve as examples of particular kinds of covert discrimination. These sea creatures provoke the octopus, leaving the player to must choose between different emotional responses to the creatures in order to guide the octopus through a series of short conversations. In this way, the project maps the experience of discrimination onto gameworld based on an underwater metaphor. (Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/mimesis)