Yesterday I Participated in an TEDx event in my department in Bar Ilan University. You can find the transcript of my lecture in the slides. Enjoy
New “Intro to Video Games” Lectures
I started teaching this year in Kibbutzim College of Education. I teach a course about integrating video games in teaching. As most teachers in israel don’t really know video games that well I decided that my 6 first lectures will be an Intro to video games. here there are, partly based on an older intro course i gave in shenkar and HIT, updated, shorter, and better.
here are the lessons presentations:
If you want the original powerpoint files for some reason please contact me, i’ll be happy to provide them for the right reason. enjoy
Filed under Teaching
Gameful Pedagogy
In the past few months I gave a few lectures about gamification, the video games industry, games & education. All those months I was too lazy to update my blog but finally today I did.
Here are my new presentations:
Gamified Education: Exercising insights from video games in education [presentation] [video]
Get to know the video games Industry [presentation]
Gamification – Now your playing with power (inproved) [presentation]
Using games in the classroom [presentation]
Gamification in the classroom [presentation]
you can find my full presentation list here.
As a bonus I started publishing some of my writings (mostly from my PhD) in a new Israeli developers magazine called “Game Dev il”, you can find my first publication here.
Filed under Gamification, Teaching
Workshop on the connection between video games and realty
Yesterday a gave a five hours workshop about the connection between video games and realty at Recanati school of business in Tel Aviv university. I hope all participants had a good time and learned something about video games. here are all the presentation i used in the workshop:
Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV-a, Part IV-b, Part V-a, Part V-b
In the picture you can see Shimi Azaria who unlocked the video games master achievement during the workshop. Well done Shimi!
Filed under Teaching
The 10th Annual Meital National Conference 2012
Just finished my lecture at the Meital conference. It was pretty hard to squeeze my 1 hour lecture to 20 minutes but i did it. You can find the presentation here and the full paper here. I’ll continue writing the post later…
Filed under Gamification
Old Global Game Jam Games
Yesterday i stumbled upon this:
This was my first GGJ game, which i’m still very proud of. It was the first GGJ and, like most participants we decided to develop quite a big game. you can read more about the game here.
And this was the game i developed this year:
again you can find more details about it here
Filed under Developing, GameIS
Gamified start-up nation
A few weeks ago I gave a lecture about Gamifaction in TechLoft, you can find the presentation here. I think there were about 50 people in the crowd, after the presentation I stayed for 2 hours answering questions and got about 30 email about it with question, requests for meetings etc’. I don’t think it was better then previous lectures I gave, I just think that in the past few months Gamification has became super important for the Isreali start-up community. Everybody is talking about, and everybody wants to learn more,
In addition the amount of Gamification consulting jobs we did at playfulshark in the past few months increased dramatically and the demand for lectures about Gamification increased as well, all indication the same thing.
As so, Next week I was invited to lecture in two more events, and as I understand both events are free of charge and open for the public. If you want to learn about Gamifiaction, you are more then welcome to join me in one of these events:
- Sunday April 29th, 19:05 at TechLoft (again) which is at 14 Nachmani St., Tel Aviv. The lecture will be part of a Habrahabr Israel Event , a Hi-tech Event for the Russian speaking geeks in Israel. The lecture will be in Hebrew as i don’t know Russian .
- Tuesday May 1st, 19:00 at IDCs acceleration program for start-ups that is called The Elevator, which is at 35 Ahad Haam in Tel Aviv, it will probably be more intimate as the event is not published and is mainly for the stat-ups in the program.
Happy 64 for our Gamified Start-up nation
Filed under Gamification
Gameful Design in Channel 8
Gamification is officially part of the main stream in Israel. Last Wednesday I was interviewed in the talk show HaYanshufim in channel 8 about Gamification. First time for me on TV, I was a bit nervous, but eventually it was fine. You can catch the show here .
If you look closely on the table you can see a few game & watch games including a Zalda game & watch game device, with is a rear thing to see in Israel. It belongs to non other then Amitay Capon who you can see in the photo. Nice to know I’m not the only one in Israel collecting old video games…
One more thing about Gamification, while preparing a lecture I gave in Bezalel I stumbled upon a new presentation by Sebastian Deterding that can be found here . At the end of the presentation he concludes that we should use “Gameful design” instead of Gamifiaction and I really think he is right. In all my lectures about gamifiaction there was always someone mixing gamification with advergaming, playful design or seirous games. Gameful design just describes the phenomena a lot better, maybe with a little less buzz, but it’s probably for the better.
Filed under Gamification, Researching
Gamification of the Israeli 4th Game Unconfrence
I had a great time at the 4th Game Unconfrence that was held today in Shefayim Israel. I’m sure this was the biggest Game Unconfrence ever. I gave a short lecture about Gamifiaction, you can grab it from here .
In addition during the event I tried to gamifiy the lectures feedback. I think i failed, but I learned a lot, failing is one of the best ways to learn. In order to understand my “game” and to learn from it’s failure you must understand the concept of an Unconfrence. In an Unconfrence anybody can lecture, at the beginning of the day anyone who wants to lecture just write his name and topic on a whiteboard and that is how the days agenda is set. One of the problems in an event like this is some of the lectures aren’t so good, and usually there is no way for the lecturer to know if he was good or not. That’s the problem I tried to solve using Gamification. I came up with a very simple “certificate-stickers system” that allowed good lecturers to be awarded. Each lecturer got a certificate each participate got 2 stickers, if you liked a certain lecture you were suppose to give the lecturer a sticker. Having lots of sticker on your certificate should have encurgerd the lecturer to take a photo of it and post it on facebook. And that’s about it.
Like many gamification experiments, it just didn’t work well. I think the main reasons it didn’t work were [1] the problem I tried to solve was not so important to the participants of the event and [2] the rules of my game were just not clear. I even analysed the experiments in the lecture I gave at the same event, it was a great example of bad gamification. I’ll probably be the only one posting his certificate in facebook page…
Filed under GameIS, Gamification
Best Games Developed in “Games Development in Action Script 3.0″
The AS3 Game Development I gave in Bait Berl ended a few months ago. During the course students who never programmed before developed a game almost each week. The course was very challenging for both me and the students. And I’m happy to say we both learned a lot. I was very proud of my students this year, Some of the games they made were remarkable and this post is about those games. These are the games I liked the most this year
And don’t forget they were made by student who with no programming experience and usually with a 1 week deadline, have fun:
Filed under Developing, Teaching