Using Games, Social Media, and Mobile Devices in the Classroom

At the 69th Annual Four State Regional Teaching Conference, this past Thursday, I presented a discussion, entitled "Using Games, Social Media, and Mobile Devices in the Classroom". Although, the thought of students playing games, updating their facebook status or using mobile devices in class can give some educators the chills, this presentation was aimed at providing practical application of these new technologies in the classroom. The research behind the presentation looks ...
read more

AGDC Day 4

Day 4 of AGDC is career day. Today's sessions are all sponsored by the Game Career Guide magazine and focus on getting into the industry. The keynote speaker for the day was from Play Fish a company that makes Facebook games. They talked about how they made a free to play game in Facebook, where you create a character, and your own space and the invite your friends into the game ...
read more

AGDC Day 3

Day three at AGDC started with the keynote speakers, who presented on the Blizzard work flow. The session focused on the team breakdown for the WOW franchise. They broke down how each departments are broken down into different teams. Teams have a narrow focus and typically consist of 5-8 people. After lunch, we attended a talk presented by Autodesk. This talked covered Morion Builder, Mudbox and the new Max feature, CAT. ...
read more

AGDC Day 2

Day two at AGDC started with a session on Premium Flash Games. The talked focused on developing high quality flash games for profit. They also pushed the idea of selling in game items instead of subscriptions. Good gameplay, open ended story social networking all make for good flash games. Another talk I attended was on developing games for teens. This session described how the average teen has a little time to ...
read more

AGDC Day 1

Day 1 at the Austin Game Developer Conference (AGDC). The exhibit floor isn't open yet, but there were some interesting lectures. Many of the talked focused on iPhone development and indie games. Tiger style studios presented a case study on their iPhone game Spider. The developers came from AAA companies and after being laid off decided to start their own indie game. They went with the iPhone because of convenience. There ...
read more