I am very excited that our new class CIS 159 Programming in Alice will be beta testing Alice 3.0 software. You may have been following my earlier post: https://www.perceptivepetal.com/wordpress/?p=156 We made the final cut, and I’m heading out to Carnegie Mellon University in January to prepare for the testing. I am very thankful and excited…
Category: Boise State Class
I’m on the List!
My classmates Sean and Kristy, the recommendations from Dr. Gibson on “The Last Lecture,” and our game development curriculum grant inspired me to dig further into the Alice Programming Language. As a result, I submitted to be a beta tester for Alice 3.0 Spring 2009. To do this we need to offer a course in…
Making an Instructional Game as Inviting and Addicting to Play as W.O.W.
I ask my studnets, “How can I make an instructional game that will teach you networking concepts as inviting and addicting to play as W.O.W.?” The response I received was, “Well, I don’t know, maybe you could come up with something like a Super Mario game,” replied one student. When I probed, he indicated that…
Realizing your Childhood Dreams
a.k.a. “The Last Lecture” This is a powerful, inspirational message for all. Randy Pausch is a guru in virtual reality, and responsible for Alice Programming.
A Kindle is in my Future
My very near future… like Monday! I had ordered three $100 gift certificates from my daughter’s school fundraising program. With just $99 more, that Kindle was in my Shopping Cart — and then the order was confirmed! I have written a grant to try to use in my classes for my students. I am particularly…
Auto Scripting
Script Me! This seems to be a very useful site; not only for the scripts you can have generated, but for the knowledge you can gain from looking at the scripts it generates! This was written by Ann Enigma and is released under creative commons license. You may wish to donate to the site to…
Building in a Holodeck — Project Progress
I found a great YouTube video from Inside this World about their Holodeck. That looks pretty neat for developing my project — I will need to purchase the Production model for this. As I was experimenting with the Demo Holodeck located in a skybox above our virtual campus, I inadvertently changed the main teleport for…
Gaming in Teacher Ed
I thought the SimSchool and VirtualU projects sounded fantastic for teaching new teachers. First of all, I never trained to be a college instructor! I was a product of an A.A.S. degree at the community college, and I went to work immediately – actually while still attending school full time! I saw that advancement in…
Critical Friends
We had a unique experience last night in our weekly meeting in SL. After our group discussion, we broke into two groups. My group went off to discuss our projects using a technique called “Critical Friends.” In our group, one person “talked” (we used text chat so that we could log our discussion easily —…
Teachers and Students Who Game
There seems to be a divided camp between the "serious" games and the games that "entertain." Why can’t both sides see that serious games entertain, and entertaining games teach? Here are the four fundamental characteristics that need to be present for learning to be facilitated (Gibson, p. 179 in reference to Bransford, Brown, and Cockling,…