Joe Rheaume of Chronotron fame has been doing a fabulous job writing reviews on this site of casual games and the educational principles they are built on. As the primary sponsor of this non-profit web site I am ecstatic about all the excitement surrounding the casual game market. Web Courseworks’ casual game Gridlock Buster, developed for the University of Minnesota’s ITS Institute, has already s

Math is the driving force behind most arcade-style games. The process of programming a game with a ship that can rotate and fire in a 360 degree arc, with missiles that accelerate and explode when they reach a target coordinate, expanding into a radius derived from the missiles power level, damaging nearby ships, and pushing them at the correct angle with a force that drops off exponentially from the distance of the center of the explosion, has given me more practice with trigonometry than all of the math homework I've ever done, and it certainly was more relevant and interesting to me.

Welcome to GamesCanTeach! This blog 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.