PHDGaming Offers EDU Blaster for Cell Phones

Steven Anderson is a Senior Applications Developer for Emory U., and runs PHDGaming.com. He e-mailed me recently about a free (and ad free) educational game for cell phones, called EDU Blaster. The object of the game is to “blast” numbers that correspond to the correct answer for x, in a math problem shown in the upper corner of the screen. For instance, the problem might be x>10*1*4. Four numbers may be drifting across the screen, and the user would need to find one greater than 40 and “blast” it.

Unfortunately, the game is not supported on Verizon phones (Verizon doesn’t support the J2ME programming language for phones that the games use). But, those with other carriers should be fine. Just use your cell phone to surf to the site and download the game. I can see this as useful for young math students to help them stay in practice. Most every kid seems to carry a cell phone these days, and parents should feel they are at least getting some mental math workouts with this game rather than the mindless twitching found in many commercial games.

Anderson also offers a free backgammon game at the site. Although his work is gratis to anyone interested, he does solicit donations if you enjoy the games. Currently he cross-promotes EDU Blaster with knowitall.org. In the works is a cell phone book implementation, featuring the classics at first and perhaps original fiction in the future.

So give PHDGaming a visit, and download Steven’s games to your phone. His site is well worth investigating.

The Cell Phone Book: Interactive Literacy for New Media

Mike Elgan over at Computerworld has a nice column discussing the much ballyhooed indicators showing a decline in reading and literacy since the early 20th Century. People just don’t read anymore, and Elgan points out where Steve Jobs said much the same thing recently (good thing they still listen to music, ay?).

But then, Elgan points out that half of the top 10 best selling books in Japan last year started out as cell phone books.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the [New York] Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

Contributing to the cell phone book craze in Japan are long commutes where book reading is hard to do, but scanning the ubiquitous cell phone is easy and convenient. The Japanese have figured out a way to make reading participatory, through cell phones and blogs explains Elgan. In America, participatory entertainment such as videogames are squeezing out passive entertainment. Thus the decline in reading.

At least, the decline in reading of books. Elgan points out something I’ve long held to be true: students are reading and writing gobs of data through text messaging, videogaming, e-mailing, web surfing, etc. etc. I look at the volume of words processed by my kids in online games such as World of Warcraft, and can only marvel at the typing speeds they’ve attained.

It boils down to literacy events in the life of a child. The exposure to text, in whatever venue, increases the reading and writing skills of children. If children read a book, a comic book, or the story line in a videogame, they are reading. And that makes all the difference.

References:
Elgan, M. (2008, January 31). Elgan: Will cell phones save books? Computerworld. [Online.] Available: http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic
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