What would the educational uses of Spore look like?

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Permalink Reply by Cathy Arreguin / Mari Asturias on June 25, 2008 at 4:23pm

I've been doodling just with the trial Creature Creature (yes... the full version is on the way). I've been struck with how intuitive the interface is .. even for non-readers. I've also really liked the video/image capture possibilities.

I think it could be super for all sorts of story telling/narrative activities. When I taught younger grades, I watched kids draw out their story before they wrote it. Creature Creator does this same thing. By the time you're done with your creature, it almost tells it's own story!

Take a look at the YouTube below. It makes great use of the new annotate feature to narrate a surprisingly sophisticated tale :-)

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Permalink Reply by Cathy Arreguin / Mari Asturias on June 25, 2008 at 4:25pm

Grr.. can't edit! That's Creature Creator!

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Permalink Reply by Cathy Arreguin / Mari Asturias on June 25, 2008 at 4:28pm

Apparently, the annotations only show up on the YouTube site... really.. DO check it out!

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Permalink Reply by Sabine Reljic / Willow Shenlin on June 26, 2008 at 4:57pm

Really cool. The small screen does not show the annotations. Like Cathy said, you've got to go into YouTube to get the whole story (Be prepared to read fast).
This was done with the full version. I don't think that we can do any annotations in the trial version. Was anyone able?
I'll try the black background. The appearing and disappearing effects are really cool.
S.

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Permalink Reply by Cathy Arreguin / Mari Asturias on June 30, 2008 at 12:49am

Actually, I think the annotations are a part of YouTube... I need to play with that.

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Permalink Reply by Sabine Reljic / Willow Shenlin on June 30, 2008 at 10:38pm

ah.....well, here we go. Post on blip.tv and I'll know. Time for me to get more acquainted with the YouTube engine, eh? Thanks Cathy :-)

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Permalink Reply by Sabine Reljic / Willow Shenlin on June 26, 2008 at 9:37am

Here is the course description we had for the SDSU Honor course we worked on:

Title: "Virtualities: Mapping Simulations and Video Games onto Real Life"
Description: "Constructive simulation-games such as Sim City and Spore as frameworks for interdisciplinary studies of real biological, anthropological, and historical trends. How information, learning, form, function, adaptation, environment, and sustainability shape biology and culture. Media as environments for exploratory learning. "

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Permalink Reply by Kae on June 26, 2008 at 7:06pm

SPORE and simulations like it.

Today I was working with an IT Technician on my campus and we began to talk about his avocation as an apiarist (beekeeper). This gentleman is now breeding queens and we had a wonderful discussion of sociobiology, the ruthlessness of nature and Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. As we're having this discussion I begin to think about what if we could do a simulation about bees or any type of sociobiology simulation. Then I came back to the computer on my desk and the buzz was about Spore. I forgot that there is a simulation coming out that can be creatively adapted to have students learn the principles we were discussing. How serendipitous!

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