Microsoft DreamSpark: Professional Developer and Designer tools for students at no charge

https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

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SERIOUS GAMES JOB: 3D engine programmer

Caspian Learning require an experienced 3D engine programmer with a broad skillset to work on a Simulations and Serious Games platform.

http://seriousgames.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=630751%3ATopic%3A30737

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What if our current productivity software was a game ?

It would suck. We’d be asked to save the princess but not be able to see a map, where the other players are, or how to escape the room we’re in. Our entire inventory would consist of a slow carrier pigeon that could deliver craploads of messages back and forth. We wouldn’t even know the score. That’s pretty much the productivity “game” we’ve been playing.

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First Look: WorldWide Telescope

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft's high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/

http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/exclusive-first-look-worldwide-telescope

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ELEKTRA: "Enhanced Learning Experience and Knowledge TRAnsfer"

The Elektra project is coordinated at the Laboratory for Mixed Realities in Cologne, Germany, but includes various contributing teams that represent a project of multiple disciplines (education, cognitive science, psychology and computer game designing). They decided that an adventure game would be optimal for an integrated environment of education, play and gaming. The player should barely notice that he or she is actually learning.

An important aim of the Elektra project is to establish a general approach for educational games that is then suitable for all subjects (French, maths, history, etc.). The Elektra game being tested teaches physics with a focus on light propagation and creating shadows. The game is set during the next solar eclipse in Europe in the year 2026. Designed as an adventure thriller, suspense is used as the motivation for pupils to continue and understand the secrets of the game (i.e. to learn).

http://www.elektra-project.org/

http://ec.europa.eu/research/infocentre/article_en.cfm?id=/research/star/index_en.cfm?p=07_main&item=Infocentre&artid=6673

http://ec.europa.eu/research/star/video/education/serious_game_en.mov

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History Game: Bow Street Runner

'Bow Street Runner' is set in London's Covent Garden in the 1750s. With crime and vice running at very high levels, and before the organised police force existed in England, local magistrates formed the Bow Street Runners and began to impose law and order.

Each episode of the game will lead the player to explore different crime scenes, collecting evidence, solving puzzles, interviewing characters and presenting the case to the magistrate for judgement. Will Fielding's fledgling police force gain the public's trust through successful convictions of hardened criminals? Only if the player, as Fielding's key Runner, can prove who did it…

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/C/city-of-vice/game/index.html

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Video Games Aren't a Waste of Time

This holiday season, parents who bought Sony's (SNE) PlayStation 3, Nintendo's (NTDOY) Wii, Microsoft's (MSFT) Xbox 360, or the latest online game need not feel guilty. It turns out young people—and adults—aren't always just wasting time when they're playing video games.

Whether they're tapping away on video game controllers or the keys of their computers in popular online games, today's game players are acquiring skills that companies increasingly value as the gaming generation enters the workforce.

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Video Games Activate Reward Regions Of Brain In Men More Than Women

Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can't put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.

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Future uses of iPhones and Laptops in Universities

http://www.oc.edu/apple/

http://www.acu.edu/mobilelearning

http://www.acu.edu/connected

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Searching for a new virtual life

Creating an avatar, an online representation of you, and living in a virtual world has been a possibility for years now.

Users already populate one world or another in the hope of living their dream life, at least virtually.

With massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) like World of WarCraft it was relatively easy to build a user base, after all, those virtual worlds were built on an already successful genre - video games - where the goal might be to carry out a task or slay a giant monster.

But in non-game virtual worlds the purpose is somewhat vague. The user can invest huge amounts of time, and sometimes money, fully exploring these worlds and not really achieving much.

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Plan to teach baby robot to talk

A university in Devon is preparing to find out if a baby robot can be taught to talk.

Staff at the University of Plymouth will work with a 1m-high (3ft) humanoid baby robot called iCub.

Over the next four years robotics experts will work with language development specialists who research how parents teach children to speak.

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Wii Fit Works

Let's get this out of the way: Wii Fit does work. Why wouldn't it? It's based on time-trued exercises. Stuff like doing sit-ups, push-ups and jogging.

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