Cheap Computers and Educational Games for Developing World

 
 I was impressed by Derek Lomas' insights and actions regarding educational games for the developing world. Derek was selected as a 2009 Pop!Tech fellow. Check it out in this video of his presentation and web site, Playpower Foundation..

Snow Day!

Creative kids up the street came up with this virtual vacation. 

Lesson: Don't let the weather get you down.

Reviewer Names Game Show Presenter as "Best Learning Tool"

Reviewer Joanna Szeto of SF Education Games Examiner shares her enthusiasm for Game Show Presenter in a recent review. You can read it here.

Congratulations on "Curiosity"

Our suburban burg of Lenexa, KS, is celebrating that local sixth-grader Clara Ma won the NASA essay contest to name the newest Mars Rover. The name is "Curiosity."

In her essay, Clara wrote that curiosity is “an everlasting flame that burns in everyone’s mind.”

“We have discovered so much about the world, but still so little,” she wrote. “We will never know everything there is to know, but with burning curiosity, we have learned so much.”

It's great to see writing skills highlighted in a national contest of this prominence. Clara will get to sign her name to the actual rover vehicle to be launched in 2011. Congratulations to Clara, her family and teachers at Sunflower Elementary School.

Congratulations to MCCC

Congratulations to the crew at Mercer County Community College on their recent national recognition for "Outstanding Technical Support and Service in eLearning". The award event cited the colleges exceptional efforts, which include a "dynamic game show format orientation for online students." We're proud to say the software being used at MCCC for that game show orientation is our eLearning game show software.

It's a clever idea: take the mundane or tedious details that must be imparted in a typical student orientation and present them as a funny quiz show experience for online students. The same concept has also been successfully applied for live orientations of students, employees and volunteers by many of our other customers. Let us know how you use our software to engage people!

Inspiring and Supporting Each Other

In these tough times, education matters more than ever. So we need to inspire and support each other more than ever.

We are inspired by comments from educators about our classroom review game show software. Here's one that made our day today:

"This is an awesome product. I teach third grade and have created/used many similar programs including those using Powerpoint and Excel. This program is worth every bit of money. It has all the features and options to make it very useful for my classroom."

We appreciate this kind of unsolicited praise. It inspires us to keep improving our classroom games and to make them affordable. That's why we offer exceptional discounts of almost 50% to schools, teachers and non-profit groups. It's our way of supporting your efforts and the effort of your students.

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome!

Bargain Buzzer System

A clever user of Game Show Presenter software told us how she found a low-cost buzzer system for Game Show Presenter by adapting the wired buzzers from the PlayStation game "BUZZ!". This solution works with the older, wired version of the buzzers, but it does not work with the newest wireless buzzers shipping with the BUZZ! game.

The good news is those older wired buzzers for 4 players are available at even lower cost now on ebay and in some used game stores. (If some clever users also finds a way to make the new wireless buzzers work on a PC or Mac, we'd love to hear about it.)

Here is a tutorial explaining what you need and how to adapt the USB wired BUZZ! buzzers to communicate with Game Show Presenter using the Total Game Control software ($19.95) from Digital Transforms. Be advised the process gets a bit technical, so this is not for everyone. But in the end, you can have a buzzer system for 4 players for approx. $50 using this approach.

If you have other low-cost or creative buzz-in solutions, let us know!

(PlayStation and BUZZ! are trademarks of Sony.)