This research examined relationships between children’s information technology (IT) use and their creativity. Four types of information technology were considered: computer use, Internet use, videogame playing and cell phone use. A multidimensional measure of creativity was developed based on Torrance’s (1987, 1995) test of creative thinking. Participants were 491 12-year olds; 53% were female, 34% were African American and 66% were Caucasian American. Results indicated that videogame playing predicted of all measures of creativity. Regardless of gender or race, greater videogame playing was associated with greater creativity. Type of videogame (e.g., violent, interpersonal) was unrelated to videogame effects on creativity. Gender but not race differences were obtained in the amount and type of videogame playing, but not in creativity. Implications of the findings for future research to test the causal relationship between videogame playing and creativity and to identify mediator and moderator variables are discussed.

The paper can be downloaded here. The MSU press release is here. The paper is in press, and will be published in an upcoming issue of Computers in Human Behavior.

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Meanwhile, A. Scott Cunningham, an assistant professor of economics over at Baylor, along with Benjamin Engelstätter at the Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (Center for European Economic Research) and Michael R. Ward at University of Texas Arlington, released a working paper on the Social Science Research Network entitled “Understanding the Effects of Violent Video Games on Violent Crime.”

Researchers have long been able to measure physiological arousal in participants engaging in violent media. This physiological measurement is seen regardless of the media. Violent TV shows, movies, music, and videogames will elicit the measured arousal as study after study has shown. But, more tenuous are assertions this arousal leads to violence elsewhere once participants are away from the media. This study seeks to empirically link violent videogame sales with decreases in reports of violence. Here is the abstract:

Psychological studies invariably find a positive relationship between violent video game play and aggression. However, these studies cannot account for either aggressive effects of alternative activities video game playing substitutes for or the possible selection of relatively violent people into playing violent video games. That is, they lack external validity. We investigate the relationship between the prevalence of violent video games and violent crimes. Our results are consistent with two opposing effects. First, they support the behavioral effects as in the psychological studies. Second, they suggest a larger voluntary incapacitation effect in which playing either violent or non-violent games decrease crimes. Overall, violent video games lead to decreases in violent crime.

The paper can be accessed here. Some good articles discussing it in the media are here and here.

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Finally, work on videogames to assist children in coping with medical problems continues in earnest. A recent example involves the University of Utah’s Engineering Arts and Entertainment (EAE) program, which brings in students from the school’s Dept. of Film and Media Arts and School of Computing to design interactive entertainment. Together with physical therapists and councilors, EAE students created a series of videogames designed to help children stricken with cancer. The unnamed minigames written for the PlayStation3 are currently being beta tested by patients in the pediatric ward at the Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City, with possible retail release in the near future. Articles on the games can be found here and here.

David Kelly, blogging at Misadventures in Learning, notes design elements in Angry Birds spark positive influences for skill acquisition. Players can jump right in with little to no learning curve, follow multiple paths to success, and are offered incentives toward productivity. Its initial platform design assists in simple productivity as well:

One of the reasons Angry Birds is as successful as it is is its accessibility.  Unlike console video games, Angry Birds was designed for mobile devices. It has no tether restricting where it can be played and was in fact designed for mobile phones, a device many people have with them throughout the day.

In addition, the level structure of Angry Birds is packaged in small chunks.  An attempt at a level can be completed in less than 30 seconds.  It’s the perfect design for mobility.

Pertti Saariluoma, Editor-in-Chief of Human Technology, noted the games’ designers professed they have no idea why the game is successful. Indeed, Saariluoma notes, good game and software design often is intuitive rather than proscribed.

Market research firm AYTM.com offered up a handy infographic showing demographics and other data from the game. Interesting nuggets include: a total of 53% of players use the free version with the majority occasionally feeling “addicted” while playing. The firm noted Michael Chorost’s article in Psychology Today listing the “addictive” elements of the game. These include simplicity, reward, and realistically simulated physics. Dr. Chorost speculates a dopamine burst may be released, making the gaming experience a pleasurable one for players. As far as using Angry Birds in the classroom, Dan MacIsaac over at SUNY-Buffalo State notes that Google returns over a million hits for “physics teaching Angry Birds.”

Mobile apps in general are receiving scrutiny from researchers, and Angry Birds is often mentioned since it’s the most popular game. Matthias Böhmer over at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Brent Hecht, a PhD. student at Northwestern, and their colleagues released a large scale study of mobile app use at Mobile HCI 2011 in Stockholm. They found users spend about an hour a day on their phones, but only about a minute at a time with mobile apps. News apps were found to be more popular in the morning, while gaming apps are more popular in the evening:

Weather checking is, not surprisingly, largely a morning activity, as is the checking of one’s calendar. On the other hand, users’ desire to fling Angry Birds at pigs is absent in the morning, and only picks up in the early afternoon and into the evening. Kindle usage behavior is even more focused in the late evening.

Angry Birds and other popular mobile games will probably continue receiving attention from researchers, with efforts likely to include discerning design details that can be adapted to more educational endeavors, as well as a continued commitment to incorporating the game itself into academics. Research always lags pop culture. By the time several thorough studies of Angry Birds are published, if any ever are, the game will likely have faded in popularity and been replaced by the next new thing.

This formula has been very successful for the company. Although only about five percent of Zynga’s player base spends serious money in their games, so many millions of people play that the company rakes in millions. They rake in even more by figuring out what the players want through data analysis.

Zynga is transforming the game industry. Traditional videogame companies create games they think players will like, then sell them. Zynga offers free games through Facebook Inc.’s social network, then studies data on how its audience plays them. It uses its findings to fiddle with the games to get people to play longer, tell more Facebook friends about them and buy more “virtual goods.” At the heart of the whole process is Zynga’s ability to analyze reams of data on how players are reacting to its games.

“We’re an analytics company masquerading as a games company,” said Ken Rudin, a Zynga vice president in charge of its data-analysis team, in one of a series of interviews with Zynga executives prior to the company’s July filing for an initial public offering.

This formula for financial success has other companies following Zynga’s lead. Rather than spending millions developing a title with a short shelf life, companies are turning to free games with extras that cost money. The primitive graphics Zynga uses are generally derided by serious gamers, but Zynga aims for the mass market, much the way American beer brewers produce bland beverages that appeal to the most palates.

All of Zynga’s games go through what amounts to a giant ongoing lab experiment involving players. Zynga conducts hundreds of “A-B tests” within its games, in which two sets of players see virtual goods on sale with, say, subtle color differences to see which color sells better…

Sizhao Yang, a former Zynga executive who helped create its virtual farming hit “FarmVille,” says his development team figured out by analyzing virtual-goods-sales data that “people buy animals a lot more than tractors and other inanimate objects.” The findings led the “FarmVille” team to more prominently feature animals in its online store, he says.

Interestingly, Wingfield reports there is considerable tension in the company between the data jockeys and the game designers. The game designers have a certain idea of how a game should look and function. The analysts drive the direction of game development based on the data, leading to tension. Some designers have quit the company in protest. Still, data remains the keystone in Zynga’s game plan for the foreseeable future.

The Zynga story on data analysis comes on the heels of the recent International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games in Bordeaux this summer (fdg2011.org). There, Brent Harrison and David L. Roberts over at North Carolina State delivered an interesting paper, Using sequential observations to model and predict player behavior. Here’s their abstract:

In this paper, we present a data-driven technique for designing models of user behavior. Previously, player models were designed using user surveys, small-scale observation experiments, or knowledge engineering. These methods generally produced semantically meaningful models that were limited in their applicability. To address this, we have developed a purely data-driven methodology for generating player models based on past observations of other players. Our underlying assumption is that we can accurately predict what a player will do in a given situation if we examine enough data from former players that were in similar situations. We have chosen to test our method on achievement data from the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Experiments show that our method greatly outperforms a baseline algorithm in both precision and recall, proving that this method can create accurate player models based solely on observation data.

While not fixating on the profit motives that Zynga has in mind, Harrison and Roberts offer clues to game designers in guiding player behavior in-game. Educational games could become more engaging:

The ability to accurately predict a player’s behavior in a game has a number of applications. While these applications are beyond the scope of this paper, we discuss two of them briefly here to better situate and motivate our approach. With a model of player behavior, we can create an experience that is unique to a user’s tendencies or preferences. For example, if we predict that the user will choose to fight a certain non-player character (NPC) rather than talk to it, that NPC can be made more willing to fight. Another application involves guiding players to parts of games that they may enjoy. Modern games often take place in large, sandbox worlds where the player is given total freedom. It’s quite possible that players may never see content that they would like because the sandbox is just so big. Predictions about a player’s behavior can be used to guide her to the parts of the game that she would enjoy.

Eschewing surveys, the authors recommend a purely data-driven approach (as does Zynga):

We feel that a purely data-driven approach has significant promise for creating accurate predictive models of player behavior in games without the difficulties associated with earlier modeling techniques. Very little research has been done in this area to date.

Read the entire paper for further discussion of the algorithm they developed. Very interesting.

References:

Harrison, B & Roberts, D. L. (2011). Using sequential observations to model and predict player behavior. In Proceedings of the 2011 Foundations of Digital Games Conference. (FDG 2011), Bordeaux, France.

Wingfield, N. (2011, September 9). Virtual products, real profits. The Wall Street Journal, p.A1.
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The trend is even stronger in South Korea, where competitive video gaming could arguably be considered that country’s national pasttime. Spectators watch and cheer while commentators breathlessly announce onscreen happenings. It’s sort of like Monday Night Football, only virtual, in a video game.

Of more interest to us is the social science surrounding the issue. Here’s the key quote:

Two University of Washington graduate students recently published a research paper seeking to scientifically pinpoint “Starcraft’s” appeal as a spectator sport. The paper posits that “information asymmetry,” in which one party has more information than the other, is the “fundamental source of entertainment.”

For instance, spectators can see the activities of both players and know when one player is preparing an attack. Such asymmetry leads to “situations that result in suspense,” said the paper, including watching one player’s “invisible Dark Templar lying in wait for their opponent’s vulnerable workers.”

Reporter Amir Efrati considerately links the paper for us in the online edition of the story. Gifford Cheung and Jeff Huang, both grad students over at University of Washington’s Information School, presented the paper at CHI 2011. Their main contention, as Efrati reports, is that informational asymmetry is key to stoking up spectator interest in Starcraft II. Here is the abstract from their paper:

Video games are primarily designed for the players. However,video game spectating is also a popular activity, boosted by the rise of online video sites and major gamingtournaments. In this paper, we focus on the spectator, who is emerging as an important stakeholder in video games. Our study focuses on Starcraft, a popular real-time strategy game with millions of spectators and high level tournament play. We have collected over a hundred stories of the Starcraft spectator from online sources, aiming for as diverse a group as possible. We make three contributions using this data: i) we find nine personas in the data that tell us who the spectators are and why they spectate; ii) we strive to understand how different stakeholders, like commentators, players, crowds, and game designers, affect the spectator experience; and iii) we infer from the spectators’ expressions what makes the game entertaining to watch, forming a theory of distinct types of information asymmetry that create suspense for the spectator. One design implication derived from these findings is that, rather than presenting as much information to the spectator as possible, it is more important for the stakeholders to be able to decide how and when they uncover that information.

It’s a fascinating premise. We’ve seen the virtualization of most everything these days. Movies and music are downloads now, rather than physical items. Books and newspapers are read digitally rather than on paper. Software simulates vehicle aerodynamics and nuclear explosions. So, of course it stands to reason that spectator sports would likewise go virtual too, thanks to video games.

Be sure and visit Jeff Huang’s site, which has PDFs of all his papers.

The first paper discussed was by Ofer Malamud over at University of Chicago and Cristian Pop-Eleches at Columbia, who studied low income families in Romania receiving a voucher to assist in purchasing a home PC. The control group were families who applied for the voucher but did not receive it.

In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian.” The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.

At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the Internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

Stross next discusses work by Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd over at Duke University, who performed similar research in the United States for the National Bureau of Economic Research. Their study noted after broadband became widely available in North Carolina, math and reading scores plummeted in low SES homes.

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.

The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups. The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students. In the report, the authors do not speculate about what caused the disparities.

Last, the article touches on the final report (large pdf) from the Texas Center for Educational Research on the state’s one-to-one laptop pilot, which indicated modest improvement on some test scores in the experimental group over the control group.

THE one area where the students from lower-income families in the immersion program closed the gap with higher-income students was the same one identified in the Romanian study: computer skills.

Catherine Maloney, director of the Texas center, said the schools did their best to mandate that the computers would be used strictly for educational purposes. Most schools configured the machines to block e-mail, chat, games and Web sites reached by searching on objectionable key words. The key-word blocks worked fine for English-language sites but not for Spanish ones. “Kids were adept at getting around the blocks,” she said.

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Unfortunately, all these studies are measuring the wrong thing. This is equivalent to giving a 1920s farmer a new radio, then measuring the increase or decrease in his crop yield. Why would you expect his crop yield to increase after he’s been given this new communication technology?

A better tool for increasing crop yield would be a tractor, which could plow more than his horse. But, the radio — the highest available technology at the time — would be considered a failure because it did not directly result in higher crop yield.

The farmer would have received timely news and weather reports which perhaps would have indirectly affected his yield. Also, the farmer and his family would have been exposed to an increase in entertainment, experiencing the latest from New York and LA. This cultural acclimation would be accompanied by a wider appreciation of world and national events, which would have had no effect on farming but would have benefited the farmer and his family nonetheless, albeit indirectly. Perhaps the farmer would learn something useful from an agricultural program, but again, looking for a direct increase in crop yield completely misses the point.

Ultimately, computers at home or in one-to-one programs should never be expected to increase academic scores, just as a farmer’s radio shouldn’t be expected to directly increase his crop yield. Home computer functions simply do not correlate well to traditional test taking. But computers do have value in several other areas, in the creative programs and games they run, and the communications capabilities they offer to students. But discerning whether an experimental group earns higher test scores than the control group is simply measuring the wrong thing.

References:
Stross, R. (2010, July 10). Computers at home: Educational hope vs. teenage reality. The New York Times, p. BU3.

Vigdor, J. L, & Ladd, H. F. (2010, June). Scaling the digital divide: Home computer technology and student achievement. National Bureau of Economic Research. [Online.] Available: http://www.nber.org/papers/w16078

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Computer Game Education Review

Type: Online

Note: Initial publication is set for 2010.

CGER is a peer-reviewed, annual, aca­d­e­mic pub­li­ca­tion address­ing issues that con­cern the teach­ing of game design and devel­op­ment. These include, but are not lim­ited to, cur­ricu­lum orga­ni­za­tion, teach­ing method­olo­gies (e.g., con­cep­tual vs. exem­plary), assess­ment tools and tech­niques, game gen­res and clas­si­fi­ca­tions, soci­etal impact, eco­nomic and com­mer­cial issues, legal aspects, and approaches to stu­dent eval­u­a­tion that are of inter­est to fac­ulty and insti­tu­tions involved in the edu­ca­tion and train­ing of future game developers.

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ELUDAMOS, Journal for Computer Game Culture

Type: Online

ELUDAMOS is an international, multi-disciplined, biannual e-journal that publishes peer-reviewed articles that theoretically and/or empirically deal with digital games in their manifold appearances and their sociocultural-historical contexts. ELUDAMOS positions itself as a publication that fundamentally transgresses disciplinary boundaries. The aim is to join questions about and approaches to computer games from decidedly heterogeneous scientific contexts (for example cultural studies, media studies, (art) history, sociology, (social) psychology, and semiotics) and, thus, to advance the interdisciplinary discourse on digital games. This approach does not exclude questions about the distinct features of digital games a an aesthetic and cultural form of articulation, on the contrary, the issue is to distinguish their media specific characteristics as well as their similarity to other forms of aesthetic and cultural practice. That way, the editors would like to contribute to the lasting distinction of international game studies as an academic discipline.

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Game Studies, the International Journal of Computer Game Research

Type: Online

Our Mission – To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.

Game Studies is a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org.

Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon.

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Games and Culture, A Journal of Interactive Media

Type: Print

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media is a new, quarterly international journal that publishes innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within interactive media. The journal serves as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking work in the field of game studies.

Games and Culture’s scope includes the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives, including textual analysis, political economy, cultural studies, ethnography, critical race studies, gender studies, media studies, public policy, international relations, and communication studies. Other arenas include the following:

• Issues of gaming culture related to race, class, gender, and sexuality
• Issues of game development
• Textual and cultural analysis of games as artifacts
• Issues of political economy and public policy in both US and international arenas

Of primary importance will be bridging the gap between games studies scholarship in the United States and in Europe.

One of the primary goals of the journal is to foster dialogue among the academic, design, development, and research communities that will influence both game design and research about games within various public contexts.  A second goal is to examine how gaming and interactive media are being used outside of entertainment, including in education, for the purposes of training, for military simulation, and for political action.

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media invites academics, designers and developers, and researchers interested in the growing field of game studies to submit articles, reviews, or special issues proposals to the editor.  Games and Culture is an interdisciplinary publication, and therefore it welcomes submissions by those working in fields such as Communication, Anthropology, Computer Science, English, Sociology, Media Studies, Cinema/Television Studies, Education, Art History, and Visual Arts.

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International Journal of Computer Games Technology

Type: Print

The overall aim of the International Journal of Computer Games Technology is to bring together both the research and development aspects of games technology covering the whole range of entertainment computing and interactive digital media. The focus will be on three research and development frontiers: first, to expand the technology frontier in terms of both hardware and software for games, second, to validate innovative procedures including algorithms and architectures for games, and finally, to explore novel applications of games technology both for entertainment and serious games.

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International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations

Type: Print

The International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS) is a peer-reviewed, international journal devoted to the theoretical and empirical understanding of electronic games and computer-mediated simulations. The journal is interdisciplinary in nature; it publishes research from fields and disciplines that share the goal of improving the foundational knowledge base of games and simulations. The journal publishes critical theoretical manuscripts as well as qualitative and quantitative research studies, meta-analyses, and methodologically-sound case studies. The journal also includes book reviews to keep readers on the forefront of this continuously evolving field. Occasional special issues from the journal provide deeper investigation into areas of interest within either gaming or simulations.

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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research

Type: Online

The Virtual Worlds Institute based in Austin, Texas, USA is a not-for-profit research organization dedicated to:

* The promotion and publication of leading research

* Direct research and innovation in the fields of virtual worlds, 3d internet, immersive interfaces and the singularity

* Developing a commercialization channel for researchers to take their ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace

The Virtual Worlds Institute is looking for, on an on-going basis: research, development, commercialization and funding collaborators and partnerships.

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Simulation & Gaming, An International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research

Type: Print

For more than three and a half decades, Simulation & Gaming: An International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research has served as a leading international forum for the exploration and development of simulation/gaming methodologies used in education, training, consultation, and research. It appraises academic and applied issues in the expanding fields of simulation, computer- and internet-mediated simulation, virtual reality, educational games, video games, industrial simulators, active and experiential learning, case studies, and related methodologies.

The broad scope and interdisciplinary nature of Simulation & Gaming are demonstrated by the wide variety of interests and disciplines of its readers and contributors, who practice in areas such as: business, cognition, communication, decision making, psychology, economics, education, educational technologies, engineering, entrepreneurship, environmental issues, human resources, international studies, language training, learning theory, management, marketing, medicine, multiculturalism, , negotiation, organization studies, peace and conflict studies, policy and planning, political science, project management, sociology, teamwork, technology, and research methodology.

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Finally, there are several journals that regularly touch on video game research while not devoted exclusively to the topic. A great example is the International Journal of Roleplaying. Video game research continues to be published in several venues besides the ones listed here.

Pesner next will be contributing to a new chapter book edited by Patrick Felicia over at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland. The Handbook of Research on Improving Learning and Motivation through Educational Games: Multidisciplinary Approaches is scheduled to be released in 2011. Pesner’s contribution will explore the “chasm” that has formed between commercial and educational games in terms of “enticing and appealing qualities” between the two genres.

This is a particularly juicy topic ripe for social science research, since it’s so fuzzy. What are the elements in commercial games making them so appealing? Conversely, what makes educational games so dull? How would we measure the difference? What can educational game makers learn from commercial game makers? I think I can speak for Elaine when I say both of us very much are looking forward to Dr. Felicia’s book and Pesner’s contribution.

References:
Clements, P., Pesner, J., & Shepherd, J. (2009). The teaching of immunology using educational gaming paradigms. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Southeast Regional Conference. [Online.] Available: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1566474

Here’s the abstract:

In many everyday situations, speed is of the essence. However, fast decisions typically mean more mistakes. To this day, it remains unknown whether reaction times can be reduced with appropriate training, within one individual, across a range of tasks, and without compromising accuracy. Here we review evidence that the very act of playing action video games significantly reduces reaction times without sacrificing accuracy. Critically, this increase in speed is observed across various tasks beyond game situations. Video gaming may therefore provide an efficient training regimen to induce a general speeding of perceptual reaction times without decreases in accuracy of performance.

References:
Dye, M.W.G., Green, C.S., & Bavelier, D. (2009, December). Increasing speed of processing with action video games. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(6). 321-326.

1. Second Life
   Second Life has a long history of educational adaptation, and the idea of using the environment for ESL purposes was adopted early. Like many efforts with no external motivations however, some formal ESL initiatives have fizzled over time. One still going strong is the Second Life English Community. Founder Kip Boahn had a nice article profiling his work in Forbes a while back. Players from almost 100 different countries regularly gather for such online ESL activities as phonetic treasure hunts through SLEC.

   The global reach, open nature, and ease of use offered by SL, (not to mention the fact it’s free), have helped academics around the world key in to the platform for language training. Since avatars can type or talk over a simple computer connection, engaging native speakers in an interesting 3D environment that is not overly taxing to most hardware results in an ideal environment for language learning.
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2. World of Warcraft.
   Of the millions of players frequenting the popular MMORPG, you might be surprised to learn there are some engaged in educational activities amidst all that medieval fantasy action. The most famous group devoted to exploring pedagogy in WoW is the guild Cognitive Dissonance, run by Lucas Gillespie and Peggy Sheehy. Lucas’ blog EduRealms follows his educational efforts in the game.

   It is very easy to start up groups and guilds in WoW, and while Asian gold farmers have annoyed North American players in the past, Dr. Edd Schneider over at SUNY-Potsdam gained considerable attention in 2007 for suggesting WoW was a promising platform for ESL in Asia, provided stateside supervised guidance was included.
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3. My Word Coach
   Although available for the Wii, the DS version of My Word Coach offers players an easier time writing, with its included stylus and touch screen. Plus, the “DS factor” makes it more portable and affordable for classroom or after-school use. It’s not promoted as an ESL product, but the vocabulary training couched in a gaming environment works just as well for non-native speakers.
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4. Webkinz
   The popular children’s game tied to collectible plush dolls offers a restricted communications feature. “Kinz chat” uses basic sentence elements for players to communicate. While Webkinz probably is not suitable to older ESL students, for the younger crowd it offers a fun and relatively painless way to introduce English. It’s also offered in 12 other languages, so gamers can play in their native tongue as well as the Queen’s.
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5. Whyville
   Whyville is the free online world designed for children learning, and it has an impressive pedigree with corporate and government sponsorship stretching back several years. Although its strengths lie in STEM games and activities, one of the key features of Whyville appealing to teachers is the sanitized chat feature where cursing is automatically edited out.

In the process of investigating the many mini-games out there, a couple of nifty titles rose to the top. The advantages to using online mini-games for ESL include the fact that teacher supervision is not as heavily needed as it is for the above examples. On the other hand, mini-games typically focus on a much narrower skill set, and kids may tire of them quickly.

A couple of my favorites in the mini-game category included Word Frog, which is a neat way to drill antonyms and such, ala Number Crunchers. I also enjoyed Grammar Ninja,which drills identifying parts of speech in a playful way.

Dr. Reese is the senior educational researcher at the Center for Educational Technologies at WJU, which started CyGaMEs, or Cyberlearning through Game-based Metaphor Enhanced Learning Objects, in 2006. Selene is a CyGaMEs videogame seeking to instruct students through the construction of virtual moons, learning a number of science-based standards and a few things about making videogames along the way.

The amazing work on Selene includes ample classroom materials. It is clear education was the primary focus of the videogame, and federal standards as well as state standards for Texas and Illinois are included in the accompanying online materials. The STEM focus is strong, and data points collected from embedded assessments allow for promising research material to be expounded upon in future papers.

The main Selene site is here, the CyGaMEs site is here, and the Center for Educational Technologies site is here. A recent radio feature and news article from West Virginia Public Broadcasting on the Selene Project is here.

References
Brown, K. (2009, November 27). Videogame research at WJU brings lunar science to life. [Online.] Retrieved December 1, 2009 from http://www.wvpubcast.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=12175