GamesCanTeach is a non-commercial project of Web Courseworks. Our goal is to promote game-based learning by bridging the gap between academic research and practice, enabling game-based learning practitioners, academics, developers, teachers, trainers, and everyone else who cares about game-based learning to:
- Keep up on the best ideas being generated by the casual Flash game development community,
- Engage with the insights of academic research into game-based learning,
- Bring those two realms together in their work, and,
- Have fun doing it.
To that end, we play dozens of casual Flash games from independent developers every week and post our favorites to this site, along with a short blurb explaining why we think the game is fun/interesting/smart and how the principles used in that game can be applied to educational games. We also read academic articles on game-based learning from peer-reviewed scholarly journals and books by recognized authors and try to draw out what is useful to us in our own practice as “serious game” developers. Our goal is never to be critical—they get enough of that from those peer reviewers—but to pick up everything we can that can help us.
And then we ask for your thoughts. All comments to this site are screened by admins to make sure that you’re always getting thoughtful content from GamesCanTeach. Because of that, you might have to wait a little while before your comment shows up—sorry, we know it’s tough, but it’s worth the wait. We encourage everyone to comment—scholars, developers, corporate suits, and people looking for a decent game to relieve some stress.
Joe Rheaume is a Flash game developer and our lead game reviewer. As a casual games guy, his street cred comes from his work as the sole designer/developer of the award-winning Flash-based casual game Chronotron under the rubric of his own company, Scarybug Games.
Jon Aleckson is an eLearning entrepreneur living the dream in game-based learning and other forms of educational technology. He is also a PhD candidate in Educational Leadership at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since he goes back to the days of laser discs, he keeps the young whippersnappers in line.
Andy Hicken is an eLearning instructional designer and, in another world, a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology writing his dissertation on Indonesian popular music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His main role is being an interesting guy to have around and writing some of our academic article reviews.
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