Institute of Play's blog

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The Institute of Play will be twittering from GLS 5.0, the fifth annual Games + Learning + Society Conference in Madison, Wisconsin from June 10 - 12. Then a sub-set of us will move on to present The Dynamic Classroom: Collaborations between Game Designers and Teachers at the 2009 Games Education Summit from June 16 -17, at Carnegie Mellon's Technology Entertainment Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Being Me team continues its hard work and has recently turned its attention to developing the applications that will fuel the platform's in-game narrative. In Being Me, as students engage in quests to help save the flagging Wiedanru population, they unlock different applications whose features grant extra abilities to the community.

Here's a sneak peek into some of the applications that the team envisions...

Pixels are tiny bits of energy that are released when students perform actions on the site, such as logging in, commenting, or posting information. Each player's pixels are stored in a "bucket," and also in a communal "wells," where pixels can be collected, shared and "thrown" in order to maintain balance in the systems underlying the Wiedanru world.

The Expertise Exchange is a knowledge bank that represents the Quest to Learn community's skills and interests. The Expertise Exchange enables users to share expertise, and receive help in areas where they have a "need to know." Through the Expertise Exchange, students learn to: participate constructively in discussions about work, ideas and problems; respond to the requests of others; receive and incorporate feedback; assess the level of their own expertise; problem solve and identify resources to achieve specific learning goals.

The Monitor, is an application which tracks and displays the emotional states, balance of energy and level of expertise of the Q2L community. Students can use the monitor's data visualization features to decipher and diagnose what is happening with themselves as individuals, and explore how their individual "state" relates to those of the larger community.

The Moodtracker is a puzzle of different and often conflicting emoticons that students use to create their daily, socio-emotional self portrait. The Moodtracker allows students to track their emotional growth to help them recognize different mood patterns, over time.

Finally the Echospot is an online diary, a safe and private space for students to communicate with mentors and record a videos in response to specific prompts.

Related Link:
Bits and Bytes from the Being Me team

Last month, the SMALLab-NY team—Katie Salen, Mike Edwards, Kyle Li and Claudio Midolo created one of three GameBot pieces that were unveiled at the GameBot exhibition held at Arizona Science Center.

In the GameBot exhibition, humans and robots came together for interactive gameplay exploring the social, technological, and sustainable dimensions of robotics.

The New York team's entry 'Swarm!' challenged players with an other-worldly call to arms: "Chaos reigns in the dark reaches of the universe! Your spaceship has wandered into a hive of space hornets. Repel the angry insects with your energy."

All three gamebots were developed as part of SMALLab, the K-12 Embodied and Mediated Learning project at Arizona State University, and created through a collaborative effort between teams of artists, game designers and scientists from Arizona and beyond.

We are delighted to announce that Quest to Learn will be located on the M47 campus at 225 East 23rd Street in NYC. In close proximity to our partners, the Institute of Play and The New School, Quest to Learn is accessible by public transportation via the 6, R, and W trains and the M23 bus line. We look forward to welcoming our new students this fall!
Download Location Information (pdf)