ETEC CAFE

ETEC 544 IP 8 Game Design 101 Exercise 1.2: D.O.A. Candy Crush Saga was once a super popular tile-matching game that is free-to-play, released in 2012. As far as I am concerned, after several rounds of play, I found the playing experience mildly entertaining, unoriginal and totally forgettable. It might be addicting at first yet after several rounds, it becomes just repetitive to me without much thinking requested. It is purely time killing game. If the game designers can add a bit more variety on the level of difficulties and solution patterns, it might be intriguing players a bit more time at least to me. Exercise 1.3: Your Life as a Game List five areas of life that can be games: 1. Fitness and health: earn rewards and points for achieving milestones can turn exercise into a fun game; 2. Personal finance: role playing for budgeting and saving, tracking progress, answering finance related quiz, accumulate rewards. 3. Education and learning: quiz, challenges for language learning 4. S...

ETEC 544 IP1   < Cats and portals: Video games, learning, and play> Good videogames provides players accessibility and problem solving opportunities - Portal is a good example. Videogames encourages players to mobilize sensory system to discover in the playing process, like how cats explore and probe the world. The article promotes players to use smart tools to become pro-ams. The author argue that good video games can be good ways to foster problem solving and deep learning skills yet it is not contradictory for school education. Students learn the sense of discovery and the ability to surmise new possibilities in new worlds by play and author appreciate the increasing number of good portal guns under today's new tech backdrop.  The article didn't really elaborate the connection of how what kids learn in virtual world can be utilized in classroom training, making play a pure play and segregate from learning. <Games as Distributed Teaching and Learning Systems> The...