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Teacher Builds Atari 2600 Space Shuttle Simulator For 8th Graders:

Looking for a fun and immersive way to teach his 8th grade students about space, science instructor Chad Shumaker brought Activision’s 1984 sim Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space to his classroom…

This article brought a smile to my face for several reasons:

• using video game technology to create an engaging educational experience
• that you don’t need the latest and greatest games or hardware
• the budget was dirt-cheap

and

• the teacher took an awful game and made it fun (or less awful)

I’m curious as to how common it is for teachers to utilize old computer games  in the classroom. My guess is hardly, particularly as classic games such as Oregon Trail are now available on cellphone and Nintendo Wii.

(via GameSetWatch, The Times-Reporter)

6 award-winning and/or nominated games, all for $20 USD. I haven’t demoed all of these games, but I can tell you that this bundle is totally worth it if you just play Amanita Design’s Machinarium (which is usually $20 by itself) or Cipher Prime’s Auditorium. All of the games work on PC, 3 on Mac, and 1 on Linux.

Buying here not only gets you a great deal on indie games, the proceeds go directly to the developers. The Indie Bundle sale lasts through Friday (2/19)

http://www.theindiebundle.com/

1,000 must be the magic number of late. Two game designers have posted $1000 rewards for their game projects. Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and Director of the Tiltfactor Laboratory, is asking Dartmouth students to propose to take on one of five game projects.

Students who develop one of these games for Tiltfactor (with ample feedback from us) up to a working, fun, usable prototype will receive a Tiltfactor Fellowship, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000.

Jane McGonigal of Avant Game is seeking game assistants to help run EVOKE, a World Bank Institute funded “10-week crash course in changing the world:”

The goal of the game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, climate change.

Both projects sound challenging and fun. Why not apply and see what happens?

tiltfactor announces game design fellowships

URGENT EVOKE: help us run a 10-week crash course in changing the world

The Taipei International Animation Festival is in full swing, and right after work I zoomed down to the Shin Kong Cineplex (the map is a lie – it’s on the south side of that road) to catch 2 shows: Taiwan Competition 2 and Taiwan Competition 3. These are Taiwanese animations submitted for this year’s competition, for which the award ceremony is tomorrow. I’m guessing today was the main showing, seeing as they had Q&A after each show with the film’s directors(not all of them though). Most of the filmmakers were students and did this work while at their respective universities.

I got a 10 ticket superpack for 1600NT, which comes out to a little less than $5 a show, each ticket redeemable for any show(except invite only…harumph) in the Festival. Apparently it came with 3 little mini-tickets redeemable for other stuff.

One was for a discount on the catalog-sized program guide, making it $6. Full color, good paper, nice stuff, and it came with a complimentary copy of last year’s guide, which was sold out when I tried to buy it. It’s nicer than the freebie small program guide, though that one is amazingly nice for a freebie.

Another ticket was for a free coffee mug with the festival logo or something on it, but it hadn’t arrived yet, so they gave me a piece of paper with secret instructions to go to a website and redeem my mug of the future for whenever it comes out.

The last ticket, which surprised the hell out of me, was for a ginormous Collector’s Edition copy of World of Warcraft which weighs more than two kilograms. It’s big enough to kill babies with a glance, or at least intimidate the really tough ones. Blizzard’s a part of this year’s festival, and one of the shows is a reel of their CG movies from Diablo II and Starcraft up through Starcraft 2. Because of this, it kinda makes sense that they’re trying to whore out WoW to patrons to get them hooked if they weren’t already. That, and they know how to find the right audience for their games.

They also had a giant inflatable orc from WoW at the cineplex, which they seem to give out to some of the net cafes here. Kinda fug fug.