Category — Mod09: Serious Game Environments

In light of our Venture Forum week, I thought I would post this interesting story for you all:

New Media BC is pleased to announce the top 20 companies selected from 37 digital media companies that attended the Fusion ’09 Entrepreneur Boot Camp held at the BC 2010 Showcase Centre.

New Media BC Fusion Forum Top 20 companies

Notably, A Vancouver company, http://www.ecobuddies.com/ has made the top 20 list for educational gaming sites.

See this story in the North Shore News:
Game showing them the way:
EcoBuddies encouraging kids to take action
“EcoBuddies has also been recognized by their peers, having been awarded best in show at New Media B.C.’s Fusion Venture Forum for Digital Media, held two weeks ago in Vancouver. They were among the entrepreneurs who pitched their companies to investors.
“It’s a really great networking tool, for both investors and for entrepreneurs,” says Ferma.
The title came with $1,000 and a three-month placement at the Plug and Play Tech Centre accelerator in Sunnyvale, Calif.”

In my research for my final project, I spoke to someone in the industry that said I should share this information with my class:

Society for Applied Learning Technology

Specfically, that there is a New Learning Technologies Conference
in Orlando, Florida
March 3-5, 2010

Among the people they suggest should attend are:
School And University Professionals Involved In Technology-Based Instruction Delivery Systems For Education

The topics included in the conference schedule are:
Gaming & Simulation
Compliance
Design
e-Learning
Training
Virtual Worlds
Mobile Learning
Knowledge Management
Social Networks & Web 2.0
Mobile Learning
New Business Technologies

I think that these topics relate to our module themes and team presentations and also to the topics covered in the other MET courses that our classmates might be enrolled in.
The person I spoke to is involved in Gaming and Simulation and Virtual Training, and mentioned the Department of Defence training videos that we were introduced to in the Module 9 presentation on Serious Games.

Hope that this link is interesting / useful for some of you.

To go along with this week’s excellent presentation, and for ESL teachers, here’s a blog that I follow. The authors of the blog often discuss ways inwhich gaming can be used for English language teaching. There’s some great info here, I think.

http://digitalplay.info/blog/