Learning Games
You may have noticed that I am fascinated by educational video games. I have recently found myself occasionally playing an old one from 2006 again and so I figured it was probably worth sharing with you all on the off chance that you have missed it.
Geosense is a simple online game that you play in your web browser. You are playing against another person and a city and country name show up on top of a map of the world. You click your mouse where you think the city is and then you are assigned a score for how close you were to the city’s true location.
Go sign in as a guest and play a round and then come back here for further discussion.
Geosense does several things right. It is super easy to play, it is fun, it is competitive, and most of all you actually learn something that you would not be motivated to learn otherwise. Geosense shows how the right kind of gameplay can help to create a fantastic learning experience that is fun and rewarding enough to motivate learning without any external goals beyond playing a fun game.
We need more such endeavors.
I’m sure you’ve probably already seen this, but I ran across it the other day and it reminded me of your post about learning games. It is challenging and it is a particularly good time to learn about gerrymandering as the census was this year and now the Republicans are position to hack away at the map. Figured I’d pass it along.
Great game. I really like it. Gives me the warm fuzzies again about California’s ability to hold on to and extend gerrymandering reform.