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Sunday Comics: Dead Island If you ever complained about homework increasing as the days got longer and the weather warmer, well, the tables have been turned. Ben Bertoli is up late doing a lot of it himself as the school year ends.
This fall, the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication will offer a course in writing about video games and reporting on the industry.
ClassRealm, the role-playing game/teaching system developed by educator and long-time Kotaku reader Ben Bertoli, has launched a website to help share the game with other schools and teachers interested in it. Bertoli says a Kickstarter project is planned soon.
Editor’s Note: Ben Bertoli is a long-time Kotaku reader and commenter, a lifetime, dedicated video gamer and a sixth-grade teacher in Indiana. He reached out to Kotaku this past week to share the story of how he turned his class into a role-playing game. The enthusiasm and motivation of the children in Bertoli’s class evoke the success stories seen in gamified experiences such as Fitocracy. Here, Bertoli explains his creation, ClassRealm, how it works and what motivated him to develop it.
Sony Online Entertainment has just announced their fifth annual “Gamers In Real Life” (G.I.R.L.) scholarship competition. Although the acronym has always mildly annoyed me, I think the program itself is great. Winners receive $US10,000 in scholarship funds and the opportunity for a paid internship at SOE’s San Diego headquarters.
It looks like an extremely early build of Visceral’s Dead Space, but it’s not. The clip above is a full play-through of Noxious, the final project for the Game Development/Art class at Full Sail University in Florida. If you want try it for yourself, it’s available as a free download.
At the two developers I’ve worked for, there’s always been a strong demand for talented programmers. You honestly can’t get enough of them. It looks like NSW’s educational facilities have recognised the growing need for developers and has realigned a number of courses to be more in tune with the current state of the interactive industry. Namely, iPhone and Android app development.
Joel Levin at the Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School in the US used popular indie block building game Minecraft as a learning tool for his second grade computer class. Now he’s a part of the newly-launched MinecraftEdu, a program dedicated to spreading Minecraft-based learning to classrooms around the world.
