Educational Games That Really Are Fun

It's often been a criticism of many attempts to make MMORPG computer games educational, that when that happens the fun goes. I have to say that it is often the case, but I think Power Up is an exception.

Power up is an educational computer game based around the concept of helping students to understand the need for clean energy. It takes the scenario of a planet ( set in the future) which needs rescuing.
The game looks and feels convincing and has some nice collaborative game play thrown in with some blasting of alien beasts. Students can play it alone or in multi-player mode. They are assigned missions that they have to complete and there is even use of some text to speech.

There are ready made lesson plans for teachers as well as a section for parents with advice on child safety.

The game is free, but you will have to download the software (200Mb!) which takes about 40Mins on a good broadband connection (and lots longer on a bad one)

It's great that the quality of these games is improving so much. This would be a really motivating game for students to play to learn more about clean energy and also good for intermediate + EFL ESL students as they would need to work at understanding the instructions to progress through the game. Also great to base a CLIL lesson around.

Definitely a serious game to be taken seriously. Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• Online Water Conservation Game
• Wonderland Virtual World and MMORPG
• Google's Lively Competitor with Second Life?
• 3B Village 3D browser
• Machinima with Moviestorm
• Looking at There.com
• Materials design for Virtual Worlds
• Immersive Image Environments
• Teaching Speaking in Second Life
• Creating multimedia stories
• Encyclopedia of Earth
• Eco City Game
• The Encyclopedia of Life

Best

Nik Peachey

Carbon Calculator

This is a really nicely designed site which helps you calculate the amount of carbon your family emits. The site looks great and is rich in vocabulary. It's probably more useful with more mature students as it asks for information like the amount you pay for your gas bill etc, but you do have the option to say you don't know.



The CO2 Calculator is aimed at a UK audience and asks for post code, but you can just type in a few letters and numbers at random and proceed.

Would be a useful tool for creating a Carbon league within your class, to see who produces the least carbon.

If you wanted to follow this up with some research. Wikipedia has some useful information on Greenhouse Gases.

Related links:

• Encyclopedia of Earth
• Eco City Game
• The Encyclopedia of Life

Hope your students enjoy this.

Best

Nik Peachey

The Encyclopedia of Life

This is a wonderful new site with some fantastic images, most of which are licensed under creative commons.

The site is still in its early days, but the intention is that it will become a kind of wikipedia of life on Earth with a vast collection of text and images and possibly other media.

Original source of image and license

There's already quite a substantial number of organisms with images listed and many of the images and illustrations are really remarkable.

At the moment the site owners are looking for people to be curators of pages or species, but later this year there is a plan to open up the pages so that anyone can contribute.

This is a fantastic resource of information and images and has loads of potetial for teaching exploitation. One of the creators of this project is Edward O. Wilson and you can also find some short video clips of him talking about issues related to the environment on Big Think. All useful and interesting stuff if you are thinking of doing any lessons on the environment or if you just need some flashcards or images to use in teaching projects.

• The link for Edward O. Wilson on Big Think is:
• http://www.bigthink.com/user/edward-o-wilson
• The link for The The Encyclopedia of Life is:
• http://www.eol.org
• To get some tips and suggestions for how to use Big Think go to my article 'Video Debating website'

Hope you enjoy it.

Best

Nik Peachey

Encyclopedia of Earth

I just spotted this rather useful looking website called Encyclopedia of Earth. It is pretty much what it says on the box and delivers quite detailed information about a wide range of environmentally related topics. It's a growing resource and they are looking for people to contribute.

There is a forum too so students can get involved in discussing some of the issues relating to the articles.

The site looks like a very credible source of free information. A lot of the articles tend to have a US focus, but there's still quite a few that don't.

The language / information level is quite high so this is for speakers with a good level of English, but there's certainly plenty of information, text, images and opportunities to interact that could make this a pretty useful tool. (Terms of use)

Hope you enjoy it.

Best
Nik