The Game Based Learning Conference was a mixed bag. The vast majority of the conference seemed focused on using off the shelf games with KS1, 2 & 3. There was little in the way of examples of what was going on in the commercial of higher/further education sectors.
That said there were a couple of talks that were of use. The talk by Graeme Duncan of Caspian Learning highlighted the ability of games based learning to enable “safe failure” illustrated by a simulation that had created allowing Army officers to run through the setting up of a vehicle checkpoint. Should the officer get the procedure wrong they can see what the consequences of that would have been without putting themselves or their men in danger. Although not to the same extreme this is something we are hoping to achieve with the ARG.
The other talk that I found incredibly useful was that by Dr Jacob Habgood, Head of Serious Games at Sumo Digital. He spoke about making the learning content intrinsic to the game by incorporating it into the gameplay mechanisms. Again this is something I am hoping to achieve with the ARG.
I’ve been playing around with the Bugle site this morning, after noticing that the theme we are using (Mimbo – excellent theme) doesn’t tie in with the d/m/y settings on WordPress. After some fishing around on the internet I found out how to change this and went through the php files to alter it. It wouldn’t be great for the suspension of disbelief if a British newspaper site was using American date formats! I’m also looking at tieing the site to Twitter so that is tweets when a new story is uploaded and adding an advertisement widgit, initially to help tie the site to the Porthampton City Council site, but perhaps in future this could be a source of revenue to sustain the unit.
Posted by craigharkness 
