Big brands get educational games horribly wrong

Consider a big organization (lets say a bank) decide to create some web based educational content because y’know Natwest have done such a great job of sending people into schools to talk about finances and lets face it banks have money to burn.

We know this because it’s our money they are burning. We know they are doing it because we get loads of requests every day to promote their content on Primary Games Arena.

PGA is an open non biased platform. If your game is good it will end up on the front page. If not then don’t moan at me when it gets a 1 star rating.

So.. Some PR douche bag at a bank employs a development company to make some game.    The development company has a little experience creating flash games so off they go making a load of “out of the box” template games that really offer nothing but an educational wave of fail.

Kids can smell this shit a mile off – don’t do it. Get a proper game mechanic first then build around that. Examples: Civilization, Sim City, Diner Dash.

Don’t be precious. Research how children in Primary Education use the internet. They do NOT use the back button nor will they search for “your bank + game name”.

Sites like Primary Games Arena use iFrames to make the pupils educational/learning experience better, we don’t care about your click through or brand recognition. If you are making Educational games with a sole purpose to increase your brand awareness then you are guaranteed to fail.

Don’t spam call me or my company or send me crap loads of urgent emails that aren’t urgent. This will get you ignored and your company blacklisted.  Isn’t this common courtesy?  Do certain organizations think they are above common courtesy or something?

No I wont do free consultation on how you can gamify or use gamification. If you want a decent a gamification consultant then hire one. Here are a few: Jesse Schell, Gabe Zichermann, Dru Wynings & of course I will be happy to help.

What is even worst is when you see “educators” create educational games but then don’t want to see their games linked to on other websites. I completely disagree with these people. The Rings of Saturn will not be kind.

Rant over. Trust me, it was needed 🙂

Primary School TV show RSS feed

I was going to tweet about this but it’s a bit too complicated to explain in a tweet.

Some of you may know I’m working on a project that brings TV shows and other video content into the classroom. (The project is called Primary School TV and is now live.)

I have been tasked with finding relevant video content, obvious choices such as CBBC make up for a % of the content available and thankfully BBC publish RSS feeds.  Youtube also makes up for another big chunk.  The rest comes from external vendors that publish feeds of their learning content.  All in all about 20 shows per day each about 30 minutes long will be available.

The whole project is no where near ready for public consumption but I thought it would be good to just update everyone to how things are going and hopefully build up some excitement for the 2011 launch.

To summarize:  We will shortly be publishing an RSS feed of TV content relevant for children of a primary school age that includes various sources worldwide and is all free content. UPDATE: This is now live, see below.

Here is a link to the rss feed from Primary School TV

Comparing PrimaryPad and Google Docs

Lots of people lately have been asking me if PrimaryPad is better than Google Docs and I wanted to make a quick video explaining how PrimaryPad is able to focus purely on learning and collaboration.  If you have ever found yourself saying “Oh I will just use Google Docs because it’s free” then this video is for you! 🙂

Never let it be said I’m not brave enough to answer my critics 😉

Primary School ICT shop

We have launched a shop!   I say we, I have had nothing to do with it personally but it looks great and it’s obvious the guys at Primary Technology have been working hard! It has a few items in now and is due a proper launch in 2011 but I wanted to give readers of my blog a sneak preview =)

You can some of your Primary School ICT bits including laptop cabs, netbooks, usb keys etc.

The idea behind the shop is that it keeps the purchasing process simple.  The shop only stocks useful items and we can allow purchashing with purchase orders.

I’m not a big fan of a company that box shifts but it turns out that our purchasing power shouldn’t be ignored as we may be able to save schools muchos dineros when purchasing equipment!  Try us out!  If we suck, let me know!

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