Eric Klopfer

Principles for designing educational games that integrate content and play and create learning experiences connecting to many areas of learners' lives. Too often educational videogames are narrowly focused on specific learning outcomes dictated by school curricula and fail to engage young learners. This book suggests another approach, offering a guide to designing games that integrates content and play and creates learning experiences that connect to many areas of learners' lives. These games are not gamified workbooks but are embedded in a long-form experience of exploration, discovery, and collaboration that takes into consideration the learning environment. Resonant Games describes twenty essential principles for designing games that offer this kind of deeper learning experience, presenting them in connection with five games or collections of games developed at MIT's educational game research lab, the Education Arcade. Each of the games-which range from Vanished, an alternate reality game for middle schoolers promoting STEM careers, to Ubiquitous Bio, a series of casual mobile games for high school biology students-has a different story, but all spring from these fundamental assumptions: honor the whole learner, as a full human being, not an empty vessel awaiting a fill-up; honor the sociality of learning and play; honor a deep connection between the content and the game; and honor the learning context-most often the public school classroom, but also beyond the classroom.

Have you ever wondered how birds flock or forest fires spread? For thousands of years people - from DaVinci to Einstein - have created models to help them better understand patterns and processes in the world around them. Computers make it easier for novices to build and explore their own models - and learn new scientific ideas in the process. Adventures in Modeling introduces you and your students to designing, creating, and investigating models in StarLogo. Computer modeling, the use of computer programs to simulate complex, dynamic systems or events (like population growth or environmental conservation), is a powerful learning tool that is finding a rapidly growing audience among teachers in middle and high school science and mathematics classes, especially since the NCTM Standards 2000 advocates its use in the curriculum. This valuable resource: Provides educators with a rich and accessible introduction to the use of computer modeling in the classroom using the popular StarLogo computer programming language; Takes readers step-by-step through the process of using computer models to simulate complex relationships; Shows how and why computer modeling can lead to powerful and enduring learning outcomes for all students. Provides explicit links between various state and national math and science content standards and the use of computer models, to enable educators to see how this work may enhance standards-based instruction; As computer use gains in currency and value in the middle and high school classroom, Adventures in Modeling will give teachers and students a very effective way to build curiosity and boost learning outcomes in a standards-based curriculum.