Author: vdebolt

The Gaming Revolution and Social Good

What are the people who make games for you and your kids thinking about and talking about? One way to keep an eye on this is by watching The Games for Change Festival. The 9th annual festival took place June 18-20 in New York City.

This year’s festival included big name speakers and announcements of new games as well as the release of tools to enable you to create your own games. Topics ranged from the science behind what’s going on in your brain as you play to the appeal of the graphic interface in a game environment.

You can find some of the talks at Livestream/G4C if you’d like to catch up on events.

Highlights

Game-o-matic is a new game of interest to bloggers. Here’s the description:

Game-o-matic, a Knight News Challenge-funded collaboration between the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Cruz, is a tool for generating journalistic games (or newsgames) through a simple “concept mapping” of relevant actors and their relationships.

A game called Dojo will help you regulate your own body’s function biofeedback style.

Deepak Chopra introduced Leela:

Leela is a Kinect and Wii retail game with the mission of connecting people to their own internal power to be happy. Extending the potential of gaming as a medium Leela offers and accesible meditative experience based in gameplay and traditional spiritual practices.

Many more games for learning, for health, for social change, and yes, even for marketing (you knew that would be there) were intoduced, discussed and demoed.

There were awards. Check the list of nominated games at 2012 Games for Change Awards nominees to see the type of games considered worthy by this group.

Prior to the event, Michelle Morrow interviewed Games for Change Co-President Michelle Byrd. It’s an interview worth reading. Here’s how Byrd described getting involved with G4C.

I had just stepped down from my position running a non-profit independent film organization. I wanted a change. I wanted to be involved in supporting media that was trying to make a difference in the world. Sometimes “Games for Change” related popped up in my Twitter feed. Whatever they were tweeting about intrigued me so I did some investigating. A couple of weeks later I was in Soho having lunch with one of the founders and learning about something that I had no idea about – the intersection of games and social change. By the time she started telling me that the organization was developing a game based on a book I was obsessed with at the time – Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky – I was hooked. I met Asi Burak, a game developer, and a couple of months later we had an opportunity to team up and put ourselves forward as a new leadership team to run the organization as Co-Presidents. Kind of crazy how organic the whole transition has been.

Later in the interview she was asked what was most exciting about this year’s event. Her answer reflects the reason that all of us should be interested in what game developers are doing.

Convergence.The best and most unique feature is the sheer convergence of ideas, people, causes, passions.It’s a committed crowd coming from numerous disciplines – game designers, developers, publishers, cause owners, academics, non-profits and NGOs. It’s the convergence of worlds which don’t necessarily interact in a daily on-going basis.

Twitter Talk

Since the festival is in progress as I write this, Twitter is the best way to give you a sense of the conversation there. Here’s a sampling of tweets.

Keynote speaker Jane McGonigal made Twitter go crazy when she announced that her company Gameful will being official work with Games for Change.

jane mcgonigal
Jane McGonigal by Official GDC via photo pin cc

 

 

McGonigal promised to increase the life of everyone in the room by about 7 minutes, which prompted this tweet to the science behind her statement. For those of you who are skeptical about the value of games, this is the tweet to click through.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The conversation is ongoing through June 20 on Twitter using #G4C12 as the identifier.

More To Explore

Note: Cross-posted at BlogHer.

Useful links: Mobile navigation, W3C media queries, track element

An alternative to select elements as navigation in narrow viewports is from 456 Berea Street.

The W3C published a recommendation document on media queries yesterday.

An Introduction to WebVTT and <track> is at Opera Dev. “Web Video Text Tracks, more commonly known as WebVTT, is a file format that allows us to mark up external text tracks. Using it in conjunction with HTML5‘s <track> element means we can associate information such as subtitles, captions and descriptions for a media resource such as audio or video, and display them synchronised with the media resource.”

At quick look at CheckThis: UPDATED

In the universe of single purpose pages, there’s a new site called checkthis.com that gives you a series of choices to check off and you end up with a web page which you can send people. The very simple tool allows you to either “tell, sell, ask, or invite.”

Here are some examples of what can be done with the tool:

check this

How is this different from Facebook events or Tumblr or Craigslist or PayPal or eVite? Well, you end up with a unique URL that isn’t part of Facebook or some other site.  As you can see from the examples, if you’re good with images, you can tell a good story or make a point in one page. You might find checkthis.com useful at some point.

UPDATE: Since posting this, a friend told me about Mozilla Thimble. If checkthis caught your eye, you may like Mozilla Thimble, too.

Useful links: Captioning, Knowbility gets grant, fair use, responsive design

Thanks to this post at Meryl.net, I found these two excellent captioning resources from Bill Creswell: Caption Resources and How to Start Adding Captions/Subtitles to Online Videos.

Congratulations to Knowbility for being on the receiving end of a big grant from Readability.com. And congratulations to Readability for recognizing the importance of Knowbility to web accessibility.

How do you know when something counts as fair use? Should be of interest to educators.

Notes to Agencies Starting Their First Responsive Site is a good checklist to discuss with students learning responsive design.

A Closer Look at Codecademy

Online programming tutorials like Lifehacker’s tutorial on coding are great places to start if you want to learn the basics of coding for free. The only problem with tutorials is that they often don’t give you much of a chance to learn by doing, and any programmer will tell you that a programming language is best learned through experience.

Up until recently, you could find a few, free interactive education courses to help you learn how to code, but many of these courses weren’t designed with pedagogical best practices in mind. Many of the available open source courses were designed by programmers, for programmers who want to brush up on some of the finer points of coding. Fortunately for those with limited background knowledge of computer science, there’s a relatively new and highly accessible online education program called Codecademy. Codecademy is an interactive series of web-based courses on coding.

Web Teacher has already devoted some attention to Codecademy in a previous post. If you’re interested in learning more about this coding education program before you sign up, here’s the scoop on the JavaScript track.

code academy tracks

Codecademy begins with the very basics of coding in JavaScript, and it uses scaffolding techniques to ease learners into some of the most complex coding tasks. The education program’s user interface is simple and well-designed. There are instructions on the left side of the screen, and there’s a terminal in the middle of the screen where you practice coding according to lesson instructions. At the end of each lesson, you’re given a “test” that requires you to complete coding tasks based on what you’ve learned. As the lessons progress in terms of difficulty, it’s best to take notes. Some users have mentioned that the courses go by a little quickly. So, make sure you give yourself some processing time between lessons and refer back to your notes when you’re tested on difficult concepts.

Staying motivated while taking any sort of online course can be a challenge for many learners. Luckily, Codecademy does provide some incentive for users to stick with its education program. Users of the program are given trophies and points as they complete lessons, and these trophies and points are prominently displayed on their profiles. If a few of your friends are also learning how to code, it can be fun to compare how many trophies and points you each have and try to compete to finish lessons first.

Codecademy undeniably makes learning how to code in JavaScript easier. However, it should be noted that learning to code is intrinsically difficult for many beginning programmers. If you’re self-motivated and dedicated to completing all of Codecademy’s lessons, however, you’ll be a JavaScript guru in no time.

About the guest author: A freelance writer and blogger hailing from the great state of Texas, Melissa Miller specializes in writing about the education field. If you’re considering pursuing an associate degree online, Melissa’s many posts on the subject can help light the way. Email her at melissamiller831@gmail.com with any feedback.

 

Why use hReview microformat?

I’ve written reviews on this blog since I started it in 2001. In fact, the original impetus for starting the blog was so I could review web design books.

Somewhere along the line, I learned about microformats and began using hReview to write book reviews. This was a good move for me and here’s why:

My Google Rank for a book review

Google likes microformats. I picked one of my reviews at random and searched for it on Google. You can see my review is ranked 4th by Google.

If you are interested in learning about microformats, I recommend the book I didn’t review called “Microformats Made Simple.” If you like learning from View Source, here are the books I’ve reviewed so you can examine what I’m doing with the code. Pick one, view source, find class="hreview" to see where the microformatted review starts. Soon you’ll know all my SEO hReview secrets.

Useful Links: Paged Media, Gaming culture, ARIA roles

A List Apart has a terrific post on the CSS3 paged media module by Nellie McKesson called Building Books with CSS3.

I know I harp on the topic of women in tech here all the time, but are you aware of the culture of gaming and the way women are treated in that world? Check these two articles: The All Too Familiar Harassment of Feminist Frequency and What the Gaming Community Can Do About It and The Thickest Skin: Backlash to the Feminist Frequency Kickstarter.

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: When to Use an ARIA Role. Sometimes adding an ARIA role does nothing.