LearningGamesNetwork

Students applying to our video contest this past week will have noticed a link to Zinch, a site that helps connect students with scholarships and colleges. Users of the site who enter our competition and also add their videos to their Zinch profiles (and tag them with #learninggames there) will have their work highlighted by the folks at Zinch.

However, this note is about another opportunity with Zinch: students who select "Game Design" as a potential major on their Zinch profiles are eligible to win a $1,000 scholarship. They must be graduating by 2010; the deadline to enter is August 20, 2009. Pass this on to any students who are thinking about this path as they prepare for college, especially if they're aspiring learning game designers!

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Yesterday I mentioned that tomorrow we'll be participating in GLS 5.0's Emerging Models of Game Development & Publication symposium, which includes our discussion of the Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) Platform.

Whether or not you'll be joining us in Madison, I'd like to point you to 10 Key Principles for Designing Video Games for Foreign Language Learning, a paper written by Ravi Purushotma, Steven L. Thorne, and Julian Wheatley. Ravi was at MIT's Education Arcade, one of our partners, while authoring this. In addition, the paper was funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which is also funding the ISLE project.

I'll give you the first principle (and one of my favorites), but I encourage you to head over to the paper for the other nine:

#1 At least as much thought needs to go into the design of failure states as for success states

If you've checked it out and returned, are there any that especially resonate with you?

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The Games+Learning+Society Conference is this week and I'm excited.

In less than 48 hours, I'll be in Madison, WI, making my way to this year's new venue, Memorial Union, and I won't be alone. Here's a quick summary of where you'll find us at GLS 5.0:

DAY 1: Wednesday
2:30-3:30pm At Emerging Models of Game Development & Publication, you'll see Alex Chisholm, Scot Osterweil, Dan Roy, and me — with Kurt Squire as the session's respondent. Descriptions: Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) Platform & Science Education-Fundraising Project. Come check it out!

This session also includes P is for Partnership: How A New Game Publishing Model Can Advance Children's Learning Across Settings (Michael Levine and Alan Gershenfeld of Sesame Workshop and E-Line Ventures, respectively) and Building a Complete Online Ecosystem for Serious Game Development and Deployment (Bert Snow of Muzzy Lane Software).

DAY 2: Thursday
11:00-12:30pm Eric Klopfer will serve as the respondent for Problem-Solving, Inquiry & Argument in Games.
2:00-3:00pm Eric will be a workshop facilitator at Augmented Reality: Using a Simplified Game Editor to Spark Imaginations.
3:30-4:30pm Kurt and Eric will be speakers at Mobile Games and Education: Current Projects and State of the Practice.
3:30-4:30pm You might also spot Kurt at The ARIS Game Jam Results: Play Some iPhone Games With Us!

DAY 3: Friday
11:00-12:30pm Eric will be a speaker at Gaming the Future of Science Learning.
11:00-12:30pm Kurt will be a workshop facilitator at Real-Time Research: Findings and Awards.
3:00-5:30pm I'll be enjoying the conference festivities out on the Terrace!

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ETC Press, the publishing imprint of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, recently released a new volume that's deserving of a mention here. The book, Well Played 1.0: Video Game, Value and Meaning, is a collection of 22 readings, each focused on a specific video game. I share this with you because I enjoyed following the story of an afternoon Civilization 4 session, recounted by LGN co-founder Kurt Squire, Shree Durga, and Ben DeVane:

Consider, for example, the discussion around what historical mod we would play that day. At the after-school club, we commonly played multiplayer games using a mod related to a historical theme or time-period that one of the participants was studying in school. Consequently, we have developed and played many scenarios over the years, ranging in topic from ancient Mesopotamian civilizations to the 100 Years War to the Industrial Revolution. This practice enabled us to not only create scenarios that might have immediate pay-off in school, but also (and probably more critically), created an atmosphere in which it was normal (and indeed desirable) for participants to talk about the academic study of history in relation to their game play. Asked if they preferred playing a random game-generated map or a historical scenario, Josh and Morgan both quickly agreed that they wanted to play a scenario, and they immediately began discussing what they were studying in school.

(If you're unfamiliar with mods, learn more here.)

Well Played 1.0 is available for free as a pdf and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License. (You can also buy a hardcopy here.)

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If you visited our student video contest page yesterday to see what's new, you saw that we've updated the contest timeline — the deadline for submissions has been extended to July 31, 2009.

To date, we've received a variety of entries that you can check out in our YouTube group. As an example, here's one of the first entries we received, which comments on the experimentation and problem-solving that are key to succeeding in the game Portal:

With this extended period, we're looking forward to all the imaginative videos the summer will bring! The first place prize in each category will still be a 16-inch HP Pavilion dv6 series notebook, powered by an AMD Turion™ X2 Ultra Dual-Core Mobile Processor ZM-84. (AMD, thanks again for your sponsorship!)

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