Educational videogames

The use of educational games, e-learning and videogames in school education became one of the main objectives of many research centres around the world.

In United States Microsoft, Columbia University and New York University had started a partnership with the Games for learning institute, to conduct different researches on educational games, e-learning and videogames.
In Europe the need for an implementation of new educational tools in school education is the new scientific research’s challenge.
The aim of all these organizations is to conduct differnet researches on the use of games, e-learning and videogames as learning tools, trying to find the perfect implementation of these new digital tools  in school education.

The European Schoolnet recently completed a survey project called Games in School, developed to analyze the use of educational videogames in European schools.

E-learning school

The survey considers 8 countries: Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Spain and United Kingdom.
The idea behind the survey is simple and its result is really interesting because show how the European education system is evolving thanks to a more focused attention on life skills and concrete abilities teaching, rather than on “classic” school’s subjects learning.
Now the big question is: how e-learning and new educational games can face this challenge?

In the survey, teachers from primary and secondary schools reported that they had used educational games, such as videogames, online games, PC games, console, mobile, etc., for the following reasons:

• to increase the motivation of students
• to develop some skills (visual, social, manual, spatial, etc..)
• Consolidate the knowledge of educational content.

According to the same teachers, the adoption of electronic games had positive effects on their students. The videogames helped many students to develop an analytic and critical thinking and to be more autonomous in their study.
Videogames are also a way to personalize learning and develop team working skills.

Those kinds of games are primarily used to learn foreign languages, but also for history, geography and mathematics.

But there are also obstacles to the introduction of electronic games in schools:
• Lack of games suited to school’s subjects;
• Lack of computers in schools;
• Cost of educational videogames and e-learning material;
• Teachers and parents’ opinion of new educational games.

The studies so far already proved the importance of e-learning and educational videogames, and the importance of their implementation in schools’ programs.

Find in the video below an intervew with Paul Holdsworth of the European Commission for the Lifelong Learning Program.

If you’re looking for practical tips to choose, educational videogames and e-learning tools, in the references you can find the links to the studies quoted above.

References:

Digital games in schools handbook for teachers
Digital games in schools study (final report)
Digital games in schools study (syntesis report)

New Rubik 360 puzzle game

Thirty years ago, a Hungarian professor named Erno Rubik invented one of the most famous brain teaser of the world: the Rubik cube. Last February was released the successor of the popular cubic puzzle game: it’s called Rubik 360 and it is a Sphere!

The mythical Rubik Cube became a symbol of the 80s with millions of puzzles sold worldwide (one of the best-selling toy in history) and millions of hardcore players challenging themselves in leagues and tournaments.
One sphere, six balls and only one possible solution make the new Rubik puzzle game quite different from its cubic father.
So The Hungarian architect Erno Rubik tried to tease again millions of people with this apparently innocuous spherical puzzle game, trying to repeat the success of his previous brain teaser.
The Rubik 360 is a sphere within a sphere within a sphere, really simple to play but very difficult to solve.
The object of the game is to get the small coloured balls from within the central sphere into the matching colour holes of the external sphere (it’s easy to say, but less easy to do).

In fact the Rubik cube brain teaser is quite harder to solve and it’s more a visual logic skill game, instead, the new 360 puzzle game it’s more related to manual ability and coordination.

I don’t know if this new brain teaser puzzle will replicate the success of the Rubik Cube, but it’s now clear that this new spherical puzzle game already become, for all Rubik cube fans, another addictive and challenging brain teaser.

Challenge your mind and if you want know better how the new Rubik sphere works, take a look at this video and find out how the solution to the puzzle in few moves .

Curiosities and facts around the Rubik Cube

- Rubik Cube has 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 possible combinations, but only one solution.

- In the world have been sold over 350,000,000 Rubik cubes

- the Cube was invented in 1974, but only in 1980 arrived in the rest of Europe

- There are more than 40.000 YouTube videos about the Rubik cube

- The first world championship ‘Speed-cubing’ was held in Hungary in 1982 and was won by Minh Thai, an American student, who solved the puzzle in 22.95 seconds

- The current world champion of ‘Speed – cubing’ is Eric Akkersdijk; record: 7:08 seconds.

- Other disciplines include solving the cube blindfolded, with one hand, with feet and underwater

Expensive old toys

Old toys and classic games are nowadays part of famous collections.
Trains, planes and cars models, dolls and dollhouses, rocking horses, optical toys, wood construction, and all other kinds of old toys and classic games are collected from nostalgics and amateurs in desperate need for a dip into past amusements.

Today, many old toys and classic games of our great-grandfathers, are considered   real artefacts , and are collected by many amateurs willing to preserve our history and traditions.

Old authentic toys (There are a lot of fakes in circulation) can be really expensive; for example the value of a rare small toy made between 1880 and 1940 can cost from £400 to £1500, and there are some unique pieces valued thousands of pounds.
Old Toys and classic games can sometimes be interpreted as a cultural phenomenon, that reflects mores and traditions of a particular historical period.
However some old toys and classic games, seem more fashionable than others, and probably contributed to shape a old but still alive cultural heritage common to many countries and people.
This is true also for old toys and classic games whose origins are lost in history, like dolls, rocking horses and toy soldiers, and for more recent inventions, such as metal cars and trucks models.

But even in the last case is very hard to identify an evolution, or at least a detailed historical reconstruction of old toys and classic games. We can only identify all the changes of the modern concept of toy, related to industrial production, the use of design and technology, the creation of specific safety rules, the application of copyright, the toys association with entertainment movies, the digitalization of modern amusement arcade.

If we only forget for an second fashion dolls, hi-tech toys and gadgets designed in Japan, and we dip into world of toy trains, soldiers, dolls and dollhouses, we understand why collectors are ready to spend thousands of dollars for and antique and rare toys:
the aesthetic and intrinsic value of some old toys is unique and priceless in its simplicity and essentiality.
In old toys collecting hobby, the passion for untold history join the love for antique and rare things preserve and maintain alive those classic games and antique toys; priceless artefacts that represent a piece of our cultural heritage and the symbol of a timeless happy childhood.

Old Monopoly edition

Who is Mr Monopoly and What are the real stories around the Monopoly board game?

Monopoly is considered, the father of all modern board games. Its popularity doesn’t know borders or language barriers and from its firsts years of life, it became the favourite board game of kids and parents.

There are so many stories and incredible facts around Monopoly that would be impossible talk about history of board games without making any reference to these events. Friends playing Monopoly in the most unusual ways and people attempting incredible records.

Here you can find some real stories and incredible facts that surround the Monopoly board game:

A Monopoly game was played underground in Greenlay, Colorado, in 1974. Eight boys played and lasted 100 hours. The participants were rewarded with a cake representing a big (and sweet) Monopoly board.

On April 10, 1974 two students at the University of Michigan, David Kemper and David Lichterman painted a big Monopoly board on the ceiling of their dormitory. To defy the gravity laws, the two students had planned to play the game using balloons filled with helium. However, at that time helium was very difficult to find, so the two students made a formal request to Parker Brothers who immediately sent them few barrels of the precious gas.

Mr Monopoly

A curios Monopoly underwater record was attempted by a team of scuba divers in Massachusetts. Parker Brothers technicians worked hard to create a special version of the game that could be used underwater. The result was a waterproof and heavy Monopoly board. In 1983 in Buffalo, 350 underwater divers played a Monopoly tournament for 1080 hours.

Even Monopoly can have its ups and downs according to a dozen people in Torrance, California who played Monopoly in a moving elevator for 148 hours.

1967 in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, a group of students of Juniata College played a game of Monopoly using the streets and sidewalks of the campus as the board. The players moved around the huge board receiving information from bike messengers and radio transmitters.

During the Second World War the Allies used boxes of Monopoly to hide and introduced strategic material for their prisoners in Germany. To help the prisoners escape, Allies secret service transformed Monopoly in a top-secret escape kit, hiding in the game box a compass, small metal tools and a map.

Monopoly Stamp

The face drawn on the Monopoly board behind the bars of the prison has a name: “Jake the Jailbird” . According to the legend in 1967 in England, some robbers played a game of Monopoly with the money of their last job.

In 1973, the Atlantic City’s Public Works superintended proposed to change the name of the real Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues, But the bill was vetoed due to the public outcry. Even the then president of Parker Brothers, Edward Parker, wrote a letter to manifest his protest saying that “The Baltic and Mediterranean Avenue belong to America and Americans”.

In the movies “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “The King of Marvin Gardens” (1972), Jack Nicholson talks about the Monopoly as the game where everything is bought and where you can win or lose everything; as in the real life.

In 1959, during the American National Exhibition in Moscow, six Monopoly boxes were part of the display. At the end of the exhibition, the boxes had mysteriously disappeared. At that time In the Soviet Union, the game was banned to being “too capitalist” . Today there is a Russian version of Monopoly, written in Cyrillic.

Old Monopoly cards

Monopoly was a great success in Cuba until Castro came to the power. Fidel ordered the destruction of all the boxes of Monopoly in Cuba.

Following the requests of NASA, Parker Brothers has already created a special Monopoly, using anti fire material (houses and hotels are made of aluminium). The Monopoly board is ready to go to the the space. In fact, the psychologist William J. Beausay believes, that during long periods in the space, the astronauts must have a pass time to help them stand the isolation and the small spaces. Beausay hypothesize a Monopoly tournament in the space with big cash prizes to motivate astronauts and distract them from homesickness.

Monopoly numbers:

• more than 160 million boxes sold around the world

• more than 500 million people around the world have played Monopoly once.

• more than 5 billion in Monopoly little green houses have been built since the first board game launch in 1935.

• Monopoly is manufactured under license from Parker Brothers in 43 countries, sold in 80 and translated into 26 languages
.
• a version of Monopoly was created Alfred Dunhill, with gold and silver houses, was sold for 25 thousand U.S. dollars.

• The longest Monopoly game ever played lasted 1680 hours, equivalent to 70 days
.
• The longest Monopoly game played in a moving elevator lasted 240 hours. Other unusual games were played n a tree house (286 hours), underground (100 hours), in a bathtub (99 hours) and upside down (36) hours.

• January 24, 1974, the first Lottery Monopoly, was win by Susan Bell in Paris, Tennessee. As a reward she received a box of Monopoly with real money ($15.140 )

• in 1978 the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog offered a chocolate version of Monopoly for $ 600.

• In 1934, when the monopoly was presented for the first time at Parker Brothers, the publishing house rejected it because, according to them the game contained 52 fundamental errors

• A Computer research identified the 3 most landed on boxes: Illinois Avenue, “GO” and B&O Railroad.

• Each year are printed only for the English editions notes for the equivalent of 40 billion dollars. More than double those printed by the mint of the United States.

• “Mr Monopoly” is the name of the man drawn on the monopoly box.

Reference: Incredible facts about Monopoly

Thanks for your interest!

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Acropolis of Athens

Once, on the Acropolis of Athens ancient Greeks used to play board games. They used to roll the dices and play in the Parthenon, the great temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, protector of the city.

Ancient Greeks played Board games very similar to our checkers or chess, with game boards engraved on the floor.

The archaeologist Eleni Karakitsou reveals that during the work of restoration of the Parthenon were found about 50 boards carved on the stairways and the floor, but they used to be certainly more.

The famous image of Achilles and Ajax playing dices under the walls of Troy, painted on many Greek vases, prove that dices games were ancient Greeks favourite pastime .

Achilles and Ajax playing dices

Ancient Greeks dices were called Astragals and were made of little animal bones with four sides.

It’s not a coincidence that ancient Greeks attributed the invention of dices and game to the Homeric hero Palamedes, who used to spent in this way the idle days in Troy.
According to Sophocles, Palamedes invented the Tavli game, a board game similar to our backgammon which is still played in Greece today.

But we know that backgammon game boards are even older: there are finds from the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and other even more older in Iran.

Another popular game in ancient Greece was the “Pentagram”, derived from the five pointed star famous symbol (misrepresented in history and movies for years), improperly called “Pentacle” in the bestseller “Davinci Code”. In ancient Geece the Pentagram, found engraved on the Parthenon floor, was a board game very similar to modern chess.

Many researchers doubt that the game boards on the Parthenon floor belong classic age, because was forbidden to play in the temples. Probably the game boards were engraved when the Parthenon was no longer a temple.

Unfortunately it is difficult if not impossible, to date the engravings. However the historian Plutarch says that in his time, (the first century AD) the floor of the Parthenon was still clean. But surely ancient Greeks were playing just outside the temple, on the hills, just like in the other ancient Hellenic city-states. Archaeologists have found several game boards engraved on the stone in various places of Greece, but unfortunately we know too little, because there is not a study or systematic collection and probably many other games have been lost with the time.

But the certain thing is that even in the past, ancients Greeks loved to spent their free time rolling the dices and playing board games.

Scale model of the Acropolis

Vikings

The Tafl is an ancient Viking board game and also one of the oldest board games ever invented.
Talfl board game is the Nordic answer to the game of chess, but its board is larger and the high number of odds leads to a high number of variants to be considered at every move; this turns this board game into into a true exercise of skill and strategy.
References to Tafl and other board games abound in many famous Viking Sagas, however some of the rules are still uncertain.
You can find here a modern reconstruction of the rules of this ancient board game.

For sure we know that Tafl was a board game for two players very popular among Viking, Norse, Celtics and other Northern Europe populations, and we also know that the game consists of:
a game board of 19 x 19 ;
24 white pawn pieces
1 white King piece
48 black pieces.
Tafl it’s a strategy board game; a wargame based on attack and defence: like in the game of chess, there are whites and blacks pieces; whites comes with a king while blacks do not. The goal for whites is to liberate their king frome black threat making him arrive at one edge of the board, while for blacks, the aim is to capture the enemy king. With the exception of the king the other pieces are all the equivalent of a pawn in chess and can move how many boxes they want until you meet an obstacle and it is forbidden to move diagonally (like the rook in chess). As regards the positions of the king occupies the middle box and is surrounded by his pawns instead blacks are positioned at the edge of the board. To “eat”, a pawn must close between two pieces while the king must be closed in four pieces.
The first evidence of the existence of this Viking board game is given to us from the discovery of a Roman tomb dated 400 AD in the Danish island of Wimose: inside the tomb, researchers fount a little fragment of the Tafl board. In an English manuscript of the tenth century (more correctly dated to the reign of King Athelstan of Wessex, 925-940) is instead shown a table with the initial layout of all pieces and some brief rules for the game.
The full name of this board game is Hnefatafl which probably means “the king’s board”: The term “Tafl” comes from the Latin “tabula” which stands for board.

The prevalence of board games in ancient Norse culture is mainly associated with migration of the people of Viking and the “playful culture” of these people is evidenced by a written Rögnvaldr Kali, dated between 1135 and 1158, in which appears a verse that refers to the Tafl board game.
We report the translation in English, from ancient Norse language:

The Tafl board game

I can play at Tafl,
Nine skills I know,
Rarely forget I the runes,
I know of books and smithing,
I know how to slide on skis,
Shoot and row, well enough;
Each of two arts I know,
Harp-playing and speaking poetry

The Tafl board game perfectly suites the mentality of the Viking people and deeply reveals the “Viking spirit”: The starting position in the board reflects the technique favored by these sailors of northern Europe: a sudden assault to overcome the enemies.
once the playerwith the king is attacked, is very difficult for him to defeat the “attackers” that surround his pieces: the goal of the game, for defenders, is just to rescue the king, a symbol of the entire Vikng stock. The capture of the king represents the destruction of the whole people, instead his salvation means hope.

It seems, according to some authors, that the game of Tafl is related to even older board games: the Greek game  “Penthe Grammai” (cited by Sophocles, fifth century BC), with which it shares the capture mode, the “Plinthion” or “Game of city “ (quoted by Cratinus) and the ancient Roman game “Latrunculi” . Other authors also found some relationships between Tafl board game and the Egyptian game ” Seega”.

Greek and Roman games are one of the little known aspects of these ancient societies.
In Hellenistic and Roman culture skill games were a recreational activity both for children and adults. Since prehistoric times is possible to recognize the so-called ancestors of games and toys among the archeological finds and in the works of Hellenic and Romans artists and poets:
We know for sure that in the fifth century BC, Crater, an Athenian playwright, wrote a play dedicated to skill games. In ancient Rome writer Suetonius wrote two different books one on Greek kids games, and the other on the Romans ones: unfortunately all these works got lost and we know only a few certain things about ancient Greek and Roman skill games.
A lot of references are traceable in the works of philosophers, poets, playwrights who, helped us to understand that in every ancient game there was a deep educational theory to help and support kids development through the use of their skills.

In the ancient Roman world the expression “nuces relinquere” (leave the nuts), meant leaving childhood and becoming adult, because nuts were used by kids to play one of the most popular skill game in ancient Rome . The nuts were used like balls and thrown to to smash other nuts, just like in the modern bowling game.

Equally fascinating for the boys was the game of Astragals, considered the ancestor of dices, a pastime practiced since since the Egyptians and Greeks. The astragal is a small bone of the foot of the goat used by kids and adults to play many skill games.

In the Hellenistic world a skill game with these little bones dates back to the Homeric work the Iliad (23, 88) when the angry Patroclus kills her friend for a quarrel arose during the game of Astragals.

Greek and Roman girls use them for the game called the five stones, which is to launch the little bones in the air and then trying to catch them as quick as possible with the back of the hands. Every kid had a bag of Astragals to play different skills games during the free time.
Sometimes, at school, teachers used to give Astragals to the good scholars and often these ancient dices were part of the funeral of the children died prematurely.
Adults, used these small bones as dices to play different skill games:
the Astragal has four sides: two flat, one concave and the other convex. Each side has a different value: 1-3-4 and 6, players roll the “dices” and the one with the highest score is the winner .

In the ancient game of Aliossi instead, four Astragals were used without the numerical value and the aim was to form different combinations from the simultaneous launch of the pieces.
A very special combination was the so-called Venus (all the four little bones with a different side face up),on the contrary, the “dog” combination was the worst (all the same sides of the pieces face up).

Scrabble is probably one of the most famous board games ever invented with over 100 million sets sold in all the world.

Today everyone knows Scrabble and have played this linguistic clever game once at least, but few people know the real story of its invention.

In fact not everyone knows that Scrabble before becoming a famous board game was first a commercial flop.

Year 1931; The city of Poughkeepsie, upstate New York, was facing the worst years of the great depression. This was the situation when an architect, Alfred Mosher Butts, lost his job and decided to devote himself to his biggest passion: board games and words. Soon Butts decided to invent a board game to play with words and improve the linguistic skills of the player. Towards the end of 1931 Butts had already developed the basic idea of the board game, which was initially called Lexico.  This game was initially played without the board and players calculated their scores according to the length of the words formed. There were also reward points for words formed with less frequent letters (B, F, H, M, P, V, W, Y) and bonus points even higher for those containing unusual letters (J, K, Q, X, Z).

In 1933, Butts tied to register the trademark of is new board game but his request was refused. Similarly, when he proposed the new board game to the two top gaming company In United States, (Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley), he received only polite refuse.

scrabble inventor Alfred Mosher Butts

Undeterred, Butts started a small scale production of his board game (nearly 200) and begun to sold them to his friends. But here ends the story of Lexico. It was not a commercial success and probably this board game would end up in the oblivion if wasn’t for an entrepreneur named James Brunot,  quite intrigued by this new clever game invention, who decided to market the product. Brunot made a deal with Butts for the distribution of this new linguistic board game: In exchange for permission to produce the game, Butts would receive a percentage for each board game sold.

Brunot had great entrepreneurial skills and soon realized that to make his new  business work he would have had to change enrich and expand  Mosher’s original idea:

Soon Brunot reorganized the board game box, the  prizes, simplify the too long original rules, and after some researches changed the name Lexico in Scrabble ®, registering the board game trademark in December 16, 1948. In that exact day the modern board game of Scrabble as we all know it nowadays was born.

In the aftermath of this new product concept, Scrabble begun a big commercial success with more than 6000 board games sold each week at the beginning of fifties. Soon it became clear that Brunot company could not meet the global high demand of Scrabble ®. So the games was licensed to Selchow and Righter, a leading American producer who had previously rejected Lexico board game offer.

Brunot ceded the rights to Scrabble ® in 1968 and the Spear company bought them for the whole world except the United States, Canada and Australia.  Rights of Scrabble board game are still divided in this way.

In 1987, after 53 years from the initial refusal of the game, the rights of Scrabble ® in the United States and Canada were purchased by Milton Bradley (MB now owned by Hasbro)

1991 was the year of the first World Championship in London, the second took place in the city of New York in 1993.

Today scrabble is still popular among adults and teenagers and there are many versions and variants like the Math Scrabble a game based on the original game, in which players must deal with numbers and make equations instead of words

Now days is even possible play Scrabble online with the flash version of this world wide famous board game.

scrabble comics

Construction toys and creative games encourage creativity, curiosity, manual abilities and meets the incredible thirst for knowledge of the human nature. In the past, due to the fragility of the materials used to make toys, we have few traces to identify a precise date for the invention of construction toys. One of the first appearance of constructions toys dates back to medieval times, around 1245, when a Franciscan monk, around 1245 , reported about an Arab game he had learned in the Holy Land, consisting of modular elements to form a sphere.

Other historical finds and ancient books, prove the Arab origins of constructions toys and modular board games, usually composed of elements of geometric form. In 1500 constructions where not only tooys, but olso ornamental building miniatures in the royal courts, a game of ability for jesters and a nice hobby for the ladies. In fact in the Middle Age, constructions toys and other games where not designed for children but for adults.

Construction toys follow the same history of tales, narrations created to entertain kings and nobles during ancient times and later become (1700-1800) stories for kids. Just like the Grimm Brothers’ tales in these period construction toys became for the first time an educational pastime for kids.

Many pedagogues and social scientists started writing essays on constructions and educational games for kids to promote healthy activities and stimulate the ability and the cleverness of the children. In this period toys became the most serious actions of children and between the end of ‘800 and early ‘900 the Liberty art movement also involved the construction games in many artworks.

The first construction toys ever realized in modern times were however limited to the skeleton and the lack of details had favored the critics’ accuses of lack of realism. But, according to German pedagogues, this lack of excessive realism allows the child to explore all the potentiality of the game, just like the dolls, whose faces are so expressionless, but the child can make them laugh or cry second his sentiments.

At the beginning of ‘900, in England, with the positivism and scientific revolution, is given top priority to scientific and technical aspects of educational games and realistic engineering constructions toys are the new clever games for kids. With the invention of the plastic, construction toys became lighter and easier to play and the educational toys market is enriched with new models, shapes and pieces more and more similar to a small scale wonderland.

Compared to the structured games or one piece toys construction have, undoubtedly, different characteristics that invest the intellectual and the emotional sphere of the child. If every form of play has the function of an educational experience for its players, the game of construction and reconstruction of any kind of object is still nowadays one of the most creative way of playing.

green world and ecological games

Some online games creators have realized many fun and educational flash games, to support the the environmental cause and here you can find the green online games top list.
I think these are among the cleverest flash games available online, because help people to “go green” and face many of the critical environmental issues of our time, such as sustainable way of life, energy savings and waste reduction. Green online games also give many tips and info about global warming and environmental pollution.
Online gaming industry endorsed environmental protection creating new ecological flash games to save the planet with the best weapons available: commitment and political activism.

All the green  flash games in the following online eco-games top list are free to play and share: