Games to defeat obesity, Napoleon, and students’ learning, and other games’ news

From Natasha Boskic:

At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (March 9-13, 2010), US Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra announced the Apps for Healthy Kids game development challenge promoting healthy lifestyle changes in young adults. The competition is a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation.  The competition is open till the end of June and the challenge has 3999 supporters so far: http://www.gdconf.com/

Those who love history, warfare and games, will be happy to engage in Napoleon: Total War, developed by Creative Assembly. The players can learn about strategy, diplomacy, and the great historical figure, Napoleon Bonaparte: http://www.totalwar.com/napoleon/

IGI Global is one of the leading multimedia publishers of books, reference works, journals etc. and every year it comes out with a number of new publications. This year, 2010 is no different. A number of new and interesting titles appeared, lots of them in the area of e-learning, games, and virtual worlds. Unfortunately, their prices are so high that one can barely afford to have one or two, let alone the whole collection. Offering them in an electronic format doesn’t help much, when that version is even more expensive.http://www.igi-global.com/Default.aspx [Tony comments 'And IGI doesn't pay authors royalties either - stay away from them']

Nicholas K. Geranios (2010). Study: New games harm schoolwork. msnbc, March 16, 2010. The study published last week in Psychological Science claims that playing games does not improve student learning. Those who do not play will eventually improve their reading and writing skills comparing to those who play, and whose skills will remain on the same level. More about the study at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35897874/ns/technology_and_science-games/?

The British Museum has developed a number of engaging activities and games to attract young visitors, enabling them to explore world histories and cultures. They can travel through time, solve puzzles, uncover hidden treasures and many other activities: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/young_explorers1.aspx

John Rice (2010) The Top Journals for Video Game Research. Educational Games Research: Research and discussion concerning instructional video games, March 20, 2010. Great short list of journals that publish articles on video game research. This is an excellent resource for academics and especially those who are new in the field and are either looking for good read or are in the stage of wanting to publish their own work, but don’t know where: http://edugamesresearch.com/blog/