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How to Design A Student Game Design Competition

Our community of educators continually tells us that students are eager to learn about game design and coding. One way to provide students with game design experience outside of the classroom is to host a game design competition. The competition doesn’t have to be large in order for students to get an in-depth look at…

June 30, 2016 // Jennifer Javornik

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Let’s Play! Transforming My Teaching to Match My Students

Miranda Salguero is a Dual Language Immersion Teacher at Sandburg Elementary, a 4k-5 elementary school in Madison, Wisconsin. The article below is a chapter from our eBook How to Teach with Games, featuring stories and resources from educators who are using games in the classroom. Miranda played an instrumental role in the creation of the eBook…

June 20, 2016 // Filament Teacher Fellow

The Game Artist’s Arsenal

What is one of the most obvious, but least-talked about aspects of digital games? It’s literally staring you in the face, and yet is not necessarily required to make a functional game. If you answered “game art,” you should continue reading. Hi, I’m Natasha, and I’m the art team lead. At Filament Games we are…

June 2, 2016 // Natasha Soglin

Building Creative Practices: Psychological Safety

This is the first piece in an ongoing series about developing skillsets that position you for success in a creative enterprise. Central to my approach is the idea that I’ll explore one concept per article. I’ve gained my perspective directing small marketing teams, wherein skinny resource margins mean that incremental growth is more achievable than…

May 25, 2016 // Brandon Pittser

Extending the Life of Your Flash-Based Video Game

While there have been several waves of education video game development throughout the past 40 years, most of the games that have been developed in the first half of the last decade were built in Adobe Flash (now Adobe Animate). In fact, some say that the accessibility and capabilities of Flash made this most recent…

May 19, 2016 // Jennifer Javornik

Machine Learning

Most articles introducing machine learning on the web start out with charts and equations showing how to fit a line to a linearly separable point cloud. That’s neat. But that does nothing to show the power of machine learning models to change the way that we write software and conduct business. There will be plenty…

May 9, 2016 // Alex Stone

Digital Museum Exhibit Strategies

Museums all over the country are exploring new avenues to bring in visitors. Gone are the days of static exhibits with the occasional movie or music feature. Now, museums must work to provide visitors with ways to interact, engage, and even transform exhibits. New technology presents myriad ways to captivate audiences. If you’re venturing into…

May 5, 2016 // Kat Shanahan

Cost to Make a Video Game with Filament Games

If I had to rank the questions I get asked about working with Filament Games by frequency, “What does it cost to make an educational video game” is, by far, the number one question. Most people by now understand the value of educational video games as a learning tool but the bottom line is that…

March 28, 2016 // Jennifer Javornik

Alternative Ways to Teach with Games

Although school districts are implementing new mobile technology at a steady pace and the number of institutions interested in implementing devices is particularly strong, many classrooms in the United States still are not 1:1. If 1:1 isn’t on the horizon for you just yet, have no fear! There are a number of ways to use games…

March 9, 2016 // Elle Jacobson

How to Conduct Playtests

Making software–any software, whether it’s an app on your phone to help you manage your finances or a game for the Playstation 4–is hard. Making good software that doesn’t drive your users nuts is harder because you have to pay attention to something called usability. People have brains, and brains have limits in how much…

February 24, 2016 // Marshall Behringer

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