I’m a big fan of SMART Board’s SMART Technologies, the Canadian company behind one of the leading interactive whiteboards. Warren Buckleitner, the editor of Children’s Technology Review, attended the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s conference, NAEYC 09, where he filmed a nice bit on SMART Technologies’ new SMART Table.
The SMART Table reminds me of the old Ms. PacMan tabletop game of the 1980s, where two players could square off with one another while seated (and yes, I threw far too many quarters down the gullet of one such machine in a College Station eatery way back when).
Various games and activities are included with the SMART Table, including puzzles, mazes, and arithmetic problems embedded in a fun environment. On one, a money game, kids have to slide representations of coins to indicate the cost of an item. Buckleitner asks the SMART rep, jokingly, “So kids could actually gamble and do poker in preschool?” I had to smile since we talked about poker in school earlier today.
Buckleitner seems a bit concerned about the $8,000 price tag for the SMART Table, but if past success is any indicator SMART Technologies will sell plenty of them. Here’s Buckleitner’s video:
The Entertainment Software Association of Canada released a report recently on Canada’s videogame industry. The PDF of the report is here. Videogames bring in $1.5 billion, topping the domestic box office receipts in Canada by a factor of four. Here’s a neat quote from Vito Pilieci, writing in The Ottawa Citizen:
Based on Statistics Canada’s estimate of 37,591 software developers in Canada, the ESAC study means video game development would account for about 24 per cent of all Canadian software production.
Canada has become a hotbed of high tech development, especially in the videogame industry. I’ve blogged previously about the outstanding research efforts Canadian universities are fielding in the field of educational videogames. According to Pilieci, videogame leviathan Electronic Arts employs 1,600 people in the Great White North. Ubisoft employs 1,500 with plans to double that number within five years. Several Canadian provinces provide tax incentives to encourage high tech growth.
References:
Hickings, Arthur, Low Corporation. (2007, October). Entertainment software: The industry in Canada. Entertainment Software Association of Canada, Toronto, CA. [Online]. Available: http://www.theesa.ca/esa-whitepaper.pdf
Pilieci, V. (2007, October 17). Report confirms growth of game industry. The Ottawa Citizen. [Online]. Available: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/business/
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Educational Conferences, Gambling, Game Discussion, MIT, Poker, Serious Games | John Rice | 
January 3, 2010 11:20 pm | 
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