Posts Tagged ‘Education’
- In: Curiosities | History
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Modern reproduction of the ancient Mesoamerican ball game
The Mesoamerican ball game was a sport practiced by ancient Pre-Columbian cultures of Central America.
More than 3000 years ago The Mesoamerican ball game was very popular, the Maya called it pitsl, the Aztec name was ullamaliztl, but the game is the same.
This game was played with heavy rubber balls in open ended ball courts of different size with two vertical stone rings, one for each side of the court.
The aim of the game was to pass the ball in the stone goal and score the point.
We don’t know exactly the rules of this anciet game, but we know that Mesoamerican ball game could be really violent. In fact some games were played just for fun and recreation, some others were part of a ritual involving human sacrifice; for this occasions the game was played in Huge ball courts by two team of captives and the losers were sacrificed in a mystic/religious ritual.
The importance of the Mesoamerican ball game in ancient Pre-Columbian society is proved by all the diufferent use this game by the Maya: the ball game was used as a recreational sport, as part of a spiritual ritual and as well to solve the disputes among tribes and prevent the warfare.
Sometimes head of tribes play (but was more like a fight) the ball game to re-establish tribes hierarchy, and impose supremacy; this game was so important because it was like a social conflicts relief valve, it was a place where the disputes could be solved with a ball game match instead of a battle.
Probably the spiritual symbolism behind the ball game is the reason of the human sacrifices: the bal represents the sun and the scoring rings the sunrise; the solar movement is tied on fertility and the sacrifice of the player is the ritual of the death and the reborn of the sun. The game was a battle between day and night, born and death, life and the underworld.
This video is a modern reproduction of the ancient Mesoamerican ball game and of the Maya ball game rituals
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Math games for children
Posted on: July 18, 2009
All the games are based on math, there’s not sport match without a score or a dice without numbers.
Board and card games need math and players have to do different calculations during a game.
For this reason math games can be, especially for children, a great Mathematics Teaching Method.
Every educator knows how difficult is teaching math to kids, and how many times he have to repeat the same concept before all the students understand it.
Using board games, like the one in the video below, is a nice trick to make some difficult mathematics principles easier to understand.
Arithmetic, geometry, algebra, there are different games for each subject to keep the mind of the kids focused on the lesson topic. Fun and math are really distant concepts in our minds because of the way we have been educated, what if we can make math lessons funny for the kids instead of boring?
When children have fun, they are more open to learn difficult math calculations, on the contrary when kids become bored they tend to lose their attention.
Math games can be the answer to this fundamental teaching problem and a very useful educational tool for kids of all ages.
The video below shows how kids can practice money values with a nice and funnyboard game.
Math is boring because sometimes kids find it hard, but math should not be a problem for any child and this is the reason why games can make math easier to understand.
Every child will love math if he enjoys the lessons!
more math games
The essential components for a good education are reading, writing and basic computational skills.
Among these three reading is considered the most important. It’s necessary to use creativity and patience to teach reading to children.
Nowadays, with internet and others media invading our lives, the pleasure of reading a book seems lost. However, present and past studies show the importance that reading has in student success rates and also prove that forcing children to read yields poor results.
A new approach to this problem is needed to find a new and more effective method of teaching reading.
When you teach child reading, you should use variety of methods and resources for a well-rounded education.
Some educators obtained great results using educational games :
A lot of methods of teaching reading includes reading games and clever gaming situations to help children memorize letters and familiarize with the language.
Kids learn more when they enjoy the educational experience, that’s why reading games are really effective to improve their skills.
For a kid, a boring standard lesson can’t be catchy as playing a reading game, and this is the reason why fun learning is more effective and interesting than old teaching methods.
Also the contribute of the family is important , but the teacher’s methods are crucial to create an overall educational experience.
The video below shows how reading games for kids can be used; a specific game could provide oral reading, another one could teach how to share the contents with the group, another one could involve the class into a recital.
The “Crazy Professor” video shows a game based reading seminar adopted by many American schools to develop reading comprehension among their young students.
This a clear evidence of how educational games can help children to learn the language and enjoy their reading lessons.
- In: board games | Curiosities | Educational | History | Role Games
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In 1920 British archaeologist Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, during some excavations in the Royal Cemetery of Ur in Mesopotamia, found the rests of a Royal tomb full of ancient and beautiful finds.
In this mausoleum Wodley discovered several incredibly well conserved exemplars of an ancient board game.
This artefact was called the Royal Game of Ur and was made more than 2600 years before Christ:
The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest board game in history and is composed by two decorated boards and two different sets of seven pieces each.
This incredible piece of game’s history is part of the British Museum’s Mesopotamia collection and was played with pyramidal dices.
Like the Faraons’ board game named Senet, the Royal Game of Ur was a race board game in which the players had to reach the other end of the board with their pieces.
This game had a mistyc power for Ancient Sumers; they believed that the dead person must play The Royal Game of Ur vs a spiritual entity in order to acess the reign of death.
This ancient Sumerian game can be played on the British Museum’s Mesopotamia website.
Some children hate math, was the same for me when I was a kid, like many other classmates of mine I didn’t like numbers, equations and when our teachers explained formulas and wrote exercises on the board my mind was always somewhere else.
I think the real problem is that math appears boring to the kids and without interest there’s no learning.
That’s why math based games can be a good stratagem to make this subject more interesting among kids and teenagers.
Nowadays we have a lot of interactive and classic math games that can be used as educational tools to show how cool and interesting math is. A game is a perfect trick to involve kids in math studies without annoying them.
It is scientifically proved, that kids learn faster if they have fun during the lesson and math games can provide both learning and amusement.
Math games are a great way to improve skills, measure proficiency and, above all, have fun. Math games keep all their promises and I think could be the future of education, especially with problematic kids and negligent teenagers.
Smart and clever games can sharp children’s math skills and make teachers happy and less stressed.
So happy math to everybody with clever games!
The training options that a company has for an effective personnel training include various topics:
– Play an active role
– Release a best share compared to its potential
– Get a better personal satisfaction
– Socialize on collective course to reach the knowledge
This attitude is encouraged by the needs and the goals of collective courses of corporate training.
Edutainment are developed and created to stimulate an independent learning attitude among employers (lifelong learning), through funny and pleasant experiences.
The neologism Edutainment comes from the fusion of the words “education” and “entertainment” and define the action of instruct and socialize one or more person using an entertainment form of communication.
Simulation games are built to explore different alternatives about individual and group behaviours in different micro or macro markets and work environments.
Simulations games spread the technical business knowledge and favour the active integration about corporate objectives,
In particular role games and Lifelong learning are created to encourage people to enjoy their life and work time and, above of all, to get the most out of any activity they ‘re involved in.
The video below shows a role game organized by an important company to build the corporate group; employers become, in the games simulation, members of a fictional army wich must act like in a warfield.
The word advergame derives from the fusion of the words advertising and game.
Advertgames are interactive games created to broadcast commercial messages, develop the brand awareness and bring traffic to consumer oriented websites.
The advergame marketing strategy begun in USA in 1998 when the firsts advertising expert start to test an different ways to promote their partners’ products.
The goal was to find a way to reach the audience and avoid the risk of annoying them with boring messages.
And the advert game was the perfect tool for this job because of its addicting and viral nature.
Was soon clear thar Advertgames can capture the target attention and create a more involved and complex relationship. In this way people remember the games and the products and advertisers push their brands.
Brand awareness, retention, brand loyalty and all the others marketing concepts shaped advergames through these Years.
Nowadays there are different advergames categories for different types of products and markets.
the most interestings are:
- Health advergames, created to reach the cosumer and built the brand equity of a pharmaceuticals industry;
- Exergames , developed to teach the children like Disney’s Hig School Musical Dance Math;
- Healthy behaviour games, like the one sponsored by Anderson Cancer Centre in Huston, who ordered a 32 million dollars anti-smoking videogame.
This last category shows how advergames can be used by media educators to inform, entertain and teach.
Brand engagement leads, are you ready to get in the advert-game?
- In: Curiosities | Educational | Psychology | Role Games | Train Your Brain
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Recreational attitude has an eclectic and a multiform nature, a fluid ad dynamic structure that can change anytime when different inputs or actions are involved in the game.
Games dynamics studies have to focus their attention on social and psychological aspects involved during the games’ performances.
During a football game, a tennis match, a chess game, or just during hide and seek always important aspects of the human nature are involved and challenged.
This is the reason why For social science and psychology these gaming situation are an important field of study and represent an opportunity to develop theories and experimental games for study purposes.
For example games, role playing and recreational activities are widely used in management training and Human resource assessments with great results.
During special types of psychological games is very difficult to fake and that’s why H&R experts can understand a lot about a person after few minutes of playing.
Games are important for team building and mutual trust development.
An example of team building game to develop in few time mutual trust among members of a new group is the game of the fall:
Each member step on a chair, flop down backwards and the other members of the team take him and lift him up.
there are a lot of different trust games that can be played for an educational and proactive approach to team building studies, in this video a youth group of scholars play the trust game falling from the teacher’s desk.
This is a good school!
Games theory is a disciple that studies the problem of the interdependence between the players of the same game.
The behaviour analysis of game players is called strategic interaction and is used in Business studies to understand complex aspects of some kinds of markets and to build descriptive models based on subjects’ behaviours in uncertain situations.
For example, the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” is one of the main problems in game theory and is used to explain the reasons of a certain player’s choice rather than another one.
Originally developed by Merrill Flood e Melvin Dresher, the prisoner’s dilemma is based on the following riddle:
Two men are arrested by the cops, but they don’t have sufficient evidence to incriminate them:
for this reason, the cops decide to lock the two prisoners in different rooms and visit them separately to make a deal.
- If one of them testifies (defects) against the other he will obtain the liberty and his crime partner will be sentenced to 10 year in jail.
- If both remain silent, the will convicted to six months jail sentence.
- If each betrays the other both of them will receive a five year jail sentence.
So prisoners have to choose if betray the other or remain silent with the reassurance that nobody will ever know that he betrayed his partner before the end of the trial.
Now the fundamental question is: how should the prisoners act?
The game theory explains this dilemma with the help of Pareto optimality, a concept developed by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who studied the economic efficiency.
The best choice for both the prisoners is to play in accord with the dominant strategy and confess their crime. This is the only way to contain the damages and the risks of be betrayed first by the other, minimizing the risk of a 10years jail sentences.
This interesting slide is a good introduction to the game theory study.
Games are very important during the child’s growth, and for this reason is very important promote clever gaming activities to our kids. On a social level, children start to develop their gaming activities in three different stages:
- Individual games; is typical of new born babies and it doesn’t involve any social interaction;
- Collateral games, children between 1 and three years start to find the firsts gaming interactions with their contemporaries, but the game still remains individual;
- Group games, children between four and five years start to develop more complex interactions during the gaming activities and the gaming group became a micro-universe in which children start to experiment the firsts social relations and to understand group dynamics functioning.
Besides, children’s gaming activities are important for the evolutionary development of the child for these two main reasons:
- With the gaming activities, children start to discover the external reality, the unknown world that is still out of his reach;
- Gaming activities help children to be in control of their internal word made of passions, instincts, and to find the perfect balance between this world and the external one.
With clever games children can discover, understand, know new things, manage their needs and follow their interests.
Children need positive experiences, harmony and love: gaming activities can favourite all those important emotions.
These are alle the important reasons why gaming activities are considered not only as the best way for children to develop their emotions and feelings, but also as the best knowledge tools to discover the unknown world.
Clever Games for Clever People
Games for your mind 
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