January was a month of varied topics. From Games to Instruction Design, to eLearning and Microlearning, it squeezed out every bit of knowledge from our best bloggers.

Talking of bloggers, it was also a month where we saw two of our team members jumping onto the blogging bandwagon – Aneesh Bhat and Abhijeet Valke . Two guys with immense potential, I promise you. You can look forward to some hardcore ID gyan from Aneesh, while Abhijeet would be the one feeding you with your weekly dose of the best of Learning, Technology and Media links .

So without much ado, lets get on to our collection of the top 12 posts for January, each accompanied by a quick brief.

I’ve been obsessing about the design of games lately and have attempted to study some of the patterns of good games. First off, these observations are driven mainly by the games I’m playing on and off currently – Patapon 1 & 2, Crysis, the Sims 3, Civilization 5, Angry Birds, and Need for Speed. Of these, Patapon is the one I’m enjoying the most as I compete against my six-year-old, and more so because it’s a very quirky, interesting game that runs on a portable platform with a very cool game mechanic.

A very popular myth surrounding game-based learning is that it involves learning through video games. This article showcases The Healing Blade, a card game which is slowly gaining popularity among medical students in the United States.

The Healing Blade is a card game that teaches budding Med students the ins and outs of infectious disease. It was created by two doctors, Francis Kong and Arun Mathews, who founded the game company Nerdcore Learning.

Reams and reams of text have been written about the practical implementation of game-based learning, but a school in New York has taken it to a whole new level.  Quest to Learn is a school which uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we’re continuing to explore game mechanics that are apt for learning. While I mentioned three that are a ‘must-include’ in a learning game, the ones I’m about to mention two that aren’t quite at that level. However, adding these makes for a certain of gaminess in the interaction mix.

1. Levels – Yes, the ones we’ve seen in pretty much all games. Levels are essentially a method that all an increase in the difficulty of game-play. The better you do at one level, the higher the likelihood you’ll make it to the next. In commercial games, extra game-features or capabilities are unlocked as you progress through levels. As an example, being able to unlock more sophisticated ‘combos’ in a fighting games.

Continuing my unintended series of posts about Learning Games, I’m moving the focus to some game mechanics I try to include every time I try to design a game that’s meant for learning. While you will almost certainly encounter these in commercial games, I’ve seen some learning games fall flat because the designers are ignoring some fundamental mechanics. When designing a learning game, you’ll want to build these mechanics into the design. Some are quite obvious, some not so.
I’m covering three I think are really important, but will follow up with another post that lists some more next week.

As our services in game design and development advance, we’re often asked how ‘social gaming’ paradigms can be used in learning games. My instant response to those would be ‘yes’ it’s possible; but faltered on further details. I’ve been doing some thinking about social games; what makes them tick. Some thoughts:

We must bank on the capital sins – wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony; while these are ‘no no’s in the real world, social games seem to capitalize on them to a large extent. When designing a social learning game, I’d definitely want to include one or more of these in some way or the other. It’s great to use the weak moments during game-play to push elements of learning value/content through to the player. Social game developers and studios use these to monetize their product, as learning designers we can use these to capitalize on learning.

In continuation to our series of monthly roundup posts, here is a collection of our top 5 posts for November, each accompanied by a quick brief.

1. Digital Instructional Media Design 101 – Principles Of Gestalt Psychology
Focuses on how a basic understanding of the Gestalt principles can help create harmonious design and improve the odds that the intended message is conveyed to the learners.

We’ve had our fair share of digital learning game development projects; and a recent one threw a spoke in our design wheels like never before. Thought I should share the top five things we learned from our experience.

1. Be absolutely certain about the game objective; what must the player do to win? – We had varied ideas and that resulted in a multitude of win-states, not nice for a learning game. Make sure to tie down to a singular objective, and one that is achievable given the game mechanics. Eliminate game mechanics that do not explicitly tie to the outcome.

When was the last time you were so involved in what you were doing that you forgot yourself? You lost track of time? You were ‘in the zone’?

All of us can recall such moments – while reading a book, listening to music, playing a sport, in an online computer game. But I wonder how many of us have felt this during an online course, or inside a classroom when being taught?

I stumbled across an interesting paper linked to in a post by Karl Kapp. The paper describes a Professor of Reading’s teachers experience and learning from playing digital games and describes some of the learning principles good games incorporate.

You need to take the time to listen to what Seth Priebatsch says about the emergence of the game layer. He also talks about four game dynamics, very interesting. “…we like to joke, with seven game dynamics, we can get anyone to do anything.”, “school is a game” makes some very powerful statements with serious implications for designers and developers of learning.