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I’m on a Quest

oregon_trail

I’m on a quest for good learning game engines.  When I do talks about games for learning, I always get the question:

“I/we thought that was great! I/we are a 1/2/3 person team, and we just have an lms guy/part time web developer/high school student using dreamweaver/old copy of powerpoint.  How do we do learning games?”

And it’s always hard to know what to tell them.   A quick look around either suggests up Jeopardy-clones or fully 3D rendering engines most appropriate for learning how to spot IEDs in Baghdad.

So, I am looking for learning games that:

1) Do not require a full blown programmer (some technical aptitude is okay)

2) Do not cost a gazillion dollars (preferably a license that is <$1500, ideally a lot less)

3) Are not game-show themed (I like Jeopardy as much as the next trivia geek, but it strips all the context out of the learning experience)

4) Is web-delivered (LMS enabled or SCORM compliant is too much to hope for, I know).

Any ideas?  I think this going to take a while, and intend to review stuff as I find it.

2 thoughts on “I’m on a Quest”

  1. Check this out – here’s a game I made in Multimedia Fusion (MMF2 for those in the know). It was very easy to make and quite a lot of fun to work with. Sure, I was following a walkthrough, but this was very easy to understand with zero programming or scripting required:

    http://drop.io/mmf2game

    unzip and run the exe. Use your mouse to move the little guy around. Warning, this game might be seizure inducing what with all the candy canes and bright colors 🙂

    I understand that MMF2 games can be delivered as Java applets which would fulfill your web delivered requirement + MMF2 is nearing the completion of a publish to swf/Flash option.

    In looking through the options, it looks like there’s a way to create data driven games via an ODBC component. ODBC makes me think that we could get this to talk to a variety of different LMS’ without too much hassle.

    The ‘Developer’ edition to MMF2 costs $370

    I’m going to insert some more flavors of chocbricks that do different fun things and see if I can figure out a way to add some violence to this thing 🙂

    oh, you can learn more about MMF2 here:
    http://www.clickteam.com/website/usa/multimediafusion2dev.html

    Reply

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