Watt's Myth

Myth, then, is the form in which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical questions which come so readily to their minds: 'Where did the world come from?' 'Why did God make the world?' 'Where was I before I was born?' 'Where do people go when they die?' Again and again I have found that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story, which goes something like this: 'There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a ...

 The Pleasure of Entrainment

If entrainment is a form of pleasure, it is a pleasure at once structural and experiential, both mathematically regular and playfully flexible. Entrainment is not a phenomenon completely unique to games, but it does come very close to identifying the curious structural pleasure that all game experiences seem to contain: the meditative patterns of Tetris; the turn-taking, clacking cadence of Billiards; the rhythmic shooting pattern of Space Invaders; the pulsing flow of cards, hits, and chips ...

 Input and Output Randomness

The fundamental difference between randomness that support strategy and randomness that under cuts strategy, input randomness allows the player to build the strategy output randomness undercuts it and limits your ability to plan ahead. For example let's look at Pandemic this is a great example of input randomness flicking the cards is certainly random, create a situation that the players need to react to that reaction is completely deterministic. If for example you have to roll dies if you re...

 Rules are the Persistent Identity of a Game Across Cultur...

There are at least two senses in which the RULES schemas offer a "formal" way of looking at games. First, the term formal is used in the sense of "form": rules constitute the inner form or organization of games. In other words, rules are the inner, essential structures that constitute the real-world objects known as games. For example, consider two games of Go that differ in a variety of ways. They might differ in terms of: Material: one version is played with stones on a wooden board; the o...

 Gamification Hand Mechanic

Mr. Hedges realizes that this technique could neatly simulate the complexity of the Iowa caucuses. He creates a deck of cards to represent Democratic and Republican candidates and all of the different kinds of factions and perspectives that might influence how voters behave in their individual caucus sites. He has one of his classes play a Democratic caucus and the other play a Republican one. The game he creates is played over three turns (coffee hour, early evening, evening). Players are as...

 Gamification Card Drafting Mechanic

Mrs. Lee creates five decks of cards to structure her assessment—each deck has two cards more than the total number of students (to increase variability). The cards in Deck 1 have the name of a 20th century poet who was not the subject of an in-class discussion. The cards in Deck 2 each feature a poetic theme (e.g., love, death). The cards in Deck 3 stipulate a poetic technique (e.g., assonance, metaphor). The cards in Deck 4 feature a form of creative expression (e.g., write a song, write ...

 Use Cards to Call on Students

When I realized that I was unintentionally disengaging from some students, I developed a classroom management practice that ensures equal participation and on-the-fly formative assessments. I use a deck of playing cards, each of which is marked with a student's name, to determine who will answer the next question. The deck randomizes participation and shows my students that I am not subjectively skipping them or "picking on" someone. The deck is the arbiter and it contributes to an engaged cl...

 Phoneme Exercises

Start simple, recommends Karen Tankersley in her ASCD book The Threads of Reading: Strategies for Literacy Development (2003): Introduce beginning sounds first. Add medial and final sounds after the child has mastered the beginning sounds. Select one-syllable words that isolate the initial letter. This method lets children clearly hear the individual sound being made. As you speak the word (e.g., pat), draw out the sound of the initial letter so students can clearly hear the sound as it i...

 Card Sorting Games for Young Children

Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task In the Dimensional Change Card Sorting Task (DCCS), children are initially asked to sort cards by a single dimension (such as color), and are subsequently required to alter their strategy to sort cards based on a second dimension (such as shape).[18] Typically, three-year-old children are able to sort cards based on a single dimension, but are unable to switch to sort the cards based on a second dimension. However, five-year-old children are able to sort ...

 Hell for Scientists

I had at one time a very bad fever of which I almost died. In my fever I had a long consistent delirium. I dreamt that I was in Hell, and that Hell is a place full of all those happenings that are improbable but not impossible. The effects of this are curious. Some of the damned, when they first arrive below, imagine that they will beguile the tedium of eternity by games of cards. But they find this impossible, because, whenever a pack is shuffled, it comes out in perfect order, beginning wit...