Developing Educational Games for Free
Modern students are sophisticated consumers of games but educational games are difficult to develop, expensive to commission and prone to unfair and unflattering comparisons with commercial games. Luckily, the barriers to teachers wishing to develop their own games for the classroom are dwindling, as the availability of tools for rapid development of games (such as Scratch) are making it possible for even non-programmers to make games. However, the difficult problem of sourcing or building suitable domain specific educational game material remains. In this presentation, Stephen will show how freely available linguistic and encyclopaedic content can be quickly adapted to make content for educational games in subjects such as history, geography and language studies. This presentation will be most suitable to educational professionals who always wanted to have their own custom games in the classroom, but didn't want to hire a programmer.
Stephen Howell is a Computing lecturer in the Institute of Technology Tallaght. He is a graduate of Computing from DCU and is researching and developing educational computer games for his PhD in UCD.
