Recreation Time

The Pearson Foundation has released another potentially groundbreaking study on digital media and learning today: “The Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy”
I have to admit I’ve only read the summary so far, but the big findings, in particular mobiles as the only platform for many youth raise an important question. If youth are increasingly [...]

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Can D.I.Y. Supplant the First-Person Shooter? – NYTimes.com.

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Re:Activism in St. Paul, one year later | Twin Cities Daily Planet | Minneapolis – St. Paul.
There’s a nice story in the Twin Cities Daily Planet about a staging of PETLab’s Re:Activism there this past weekend. The focus of the event was to commemorate the RNC protests one year later. The folks in St. Paul [...]

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Epeus’ epigone: How Twitter works in theory is a really nice introduction to the social dimensions of the communicrack that is twitter. I’m currently working on a variety of twitter-based game projects with the design group Local No. 12 and find the design constraints of working with 140 characters of text super interesting.
In the post [...]

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I just posted a story about PETLab’s game design curriculum for Boys & Girl’s Club. Check it out:
Spotlight on DML | “We Don’t Need More School”: Learning Game Design After School.

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On Sunday June 14th, college students, White House staffers, The House Budget Committee and Treasury Department competed head to head in a national Budgetball tournament on the National Mall – a game designed by PETLab and Area/Code to create awareness around the Nation’s budget deficit. US Secretary General Tim Geithner congratulated participants and praised the game, saying [...]

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An article in the NY Times yesterday, “Whiffle Hurling? Bag Tag? Hey, It’s Art”
talks about the growing phenomenon of “art sports”. This is particularly coincidental since today I’m going to go playtest an “art sport” designed by Eric Zimmerman called “Grid Ball”. It will be making its debut at the Come Out and Play Festival [...]

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NPR did a nice piece on the recent Budgetball tournament at University of Miami. Budgetball is a fast-paced sport designed by PETLab in collaboration with Area/Code for the National Academy of Public Administration to raise awareness and understanding about the Federal deficit.
Give it a listen: University Uses Game To Teach Money Skills : NPR.

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From Offworld, a link to news games done in Processing. Very cool mini-games!
At PETLab we’re working on a set of projects called “DataPlay” that interpret “serious” information with playful game mechanics. More on this soon…
Boing Boing: Offworld.

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It’s really nice to hear the giants talking about these things — and from what I’m hearing from friends returning from GDC, social games, indie games and new models for distribution are the big thematic takeaways. I sense a revolution on the way…
Gamasutra – News – GDC: Wright, Molyneux, Gordon, and Lanning on Games and [...]

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