Teaching economics & ethics with Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker

Unusual ways to teach economics. I’m currently playing Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker, a silly but fun little game in which you run a dating agency and try to get your clients on successful dates and, eventually, into a successful relationship. Now one way of playing this would be to just prioritize the benefit of each client, trying to get them in maximally satisfying relationships as fast...

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Bayesian academy game: A core mechanic

I feel like my progress with my academy game has been frustratingly slow. Lots of natural language, little code. Over Christmas leave I finally put together a simple Bayes net and belief propagation implementation, but when I was about to move on to start actually implementing the game side of things, I realized that some of the things that I had planned didn’t quite work after all. Then I...

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Bayesian academy game: Some game mechanics

So far I have spoken about the possibility of edugames being good, sketched out the basic idea of an edugame built around Bayesian networks, and outlined some design constraints. Now it’s finally the time to get to the actual meat of the matter – the game mechanics. Note that everything here is subject to change. I’m aiming to outline things to a sufficient level of detail that I have a...

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Bayesian academy game: Constraints

My work on my Master’s thesis and the Bayesian academy game was temporarily interrupted when I had to focus on finishing the work I had piled up for another course. Now I’m slowly trying to get back into the flow, so here’s a post on some of the things that I’ll be trying to keep in mind while creating the game, and which should help shape its design. This post is still somewhat abstract:...

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Towards meaningfully gamifying Bayesian Networks, or, just what can you do with them

In my previous article, I argued that educational games could be good if they implemented their educational content in a meaningful way. This means making the player actually use the educational material to predict the possible consequences of different choices within the game, in such a manner that the choices will have both short- and long-term consequences. More specifically, I talked about my...

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Teaching Bayesian networks by means of social scheming, or, why edugames don’t have to suck

As a part of my Master’s thesis in Computer Science, I am designing a game which seeks to teach its players a subfield of math known as Bayesian networks, hopefully in a fun and enjoyable way. This post explains some of the basic design and educational philosophy behind the game, and will hopefully also convince you that educational games don’t have to suck. I will start by discussing a...

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Doing Good in the Addiction Economy

The world is becoming ever-more addictive and distracting, showering us with short-term rewards. But we can still take control of those mechanisms in order to do good in the world, and make ourselves into better people.

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Dissecting edugames: iCivics.org

The Serious Games Market blog showcases a number of interesting edugames, and I thought that I should try some. One of the posts linked to an interesting-sounding site called iCivics.org, which has a number of educational games that are designed to teach kids about the way the US government works. Some of the games were relatively good. Others were dreadful enough that even with a designed...

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Videogames will revolutionize school (not necessarily the way you think)

A lot of the hype around educational games centers around "gamification", and using game techniques to make the boring drilling of facts into something more fun. Which would be a definite improvement, but I don't think that it's ambitious enough.

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Book review: What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. James Paul Gee. Palgrave Macmillan. (This review is based on the first edition of the book.) This book was a very nice discussion about video games in light of various academic theories of learning. I particularly liked this point: “The fact that human learning is a practice effect can create a good deal of difficulty for...

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