Serious games can help with serious learning and fun. Using a research based rubric developed by educators at the University of Alaska Southeast, my students and the teachers in Dr.Lee Graham's course evaluated games. There are 34 completely finished and ranked and others who need teacher reviews. (You can join in and review, anything tagged teacher_rev needs a teacher review, and we have quite a few so we could calculate the final score. When you ask to join, just let me know who you are, where you're from, your school, and that you'd like to help. Thank you!)

My students will be presenting today at 1:20 pm EDT and tomorrow (time tentatively changed to 9:15 am EDT tomorrow due to a schedule change). Scroll down for the links.

The nice thing about scheduling through Google Hangout and YouTube live is that after these presentations, the links below will become the official video for you to watch if you come upon this post later. We are experimenting with a new way to share slides and audio and these are being created as OER resources as part of the Gamifi-ED OOC. I hope that some of you will watch the stream and pose questions using the Q&A Tool that you'll see on the screen. (I”m not sure if that tool shows up on YouTube Live but I know it shows up when you watch on Google Plus.) Here are the links you'll need to watch today or to view the videos after they are presented.

It is Time to Curate Our Own Apps

These students have tested hundreds of games and one of the biggest things that has emerged is that we are trusting the app stores to curate for us and we shouldn't. (See my Edutopia post from last week on this.) The best apps from an educational perspective are not rising to the top. I really like the model that the students and educators worked out for both Workflow and evaluating the games and if enough of you want to join in and add to the database or have your students test games, then we can keep adding to the great repository of reviews and information. Just reply to this post or contact me and we'll explore further. I have lots of student mentors who would love to help students of all ages get started adding their game reviews.

When you see the students present, you'll hear them talk about a Gamifi-ed score. The best a game can receive is 30.

Gamifi-ed Student Evaluation Criteria

There are 7 aspects evaluated by students including:  Problem Solving, Player Freedom, Game Play, Motivation, Real-World Connections, Teamwork, and Creativity.

Gamifi-ed Educator Evaluation Criteria

There are 8 aspects evaluated by educators including: Purpose, Narrative Context, Organization/ Problem Solving, Engagement Level, Collaboration, Scaffolding and mastery, Feedback, and Utility.

How the score is calculated

For each aspect, a game is rated as a “Rock Star” (2 points), “OK” (1 point) or “Not OK” (0 points). The points are totaled and put at the top.

Top games so far include

• Sparx (30 points) – A game out of New Zealand to help kids with depression and coping that you have to play to believe (this will be talked about in both sessions.)
• AIC Conflict Simulation (28 points) – the Simulation run by the University of Michigan that helps students understand current events and the Middle East

You can also view the games by topic: Current Events, Health, Social Studies, Language arts, Languages, Math, Science.

Class Period #1: Serious Games Smackdown – March 26, 2014 1:20 pm EDT

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfB2xOjCHoA
Google Plus Link: https://plus.google.com/events/cen2p8f3uc0drnbdjb6t57mgv8k

Class Period #2: Serious Games Smackdown – March 26, 2014 9:15 am EDT

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxd6QpCy4U
Google Plus Link:https://plus.google.com/events/c1pi424k7pp8212i95c41m049mc

Feel free to join us or to watch the videos and leave your thoughts. You can find all of these games on the Gamifi-ed wiki.