Filament Games Blog

ESA Heartland Series: An Interview with Dan White

Note: This interview first appeared in the Entertainment Software Association blog. Showcasing the geographic diversity of the video game industry, the Heartland Series features interviews with video game publishers, developers, and innovators from across America, highlighting the groundbreaking work and innovation they bring to every corner of the nation. This month, ESA asked Dan White,…

October 9, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Video Games and The Scientific Method

The Mario Method Form a question, create a hypothesis, predict the outcome, test your theory. Sound familiar? You probably recognize these steps as the foundational structure of the scientific method. Human beings have used this simple yet profound process to structure scientific inquiry for hundreds of years, and based on the fact that I’m typing…

October 4, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Project Highlight: Aquation from the Smithsonian Institute

Learning games are powerful tools for delivering information – whether you’re teaching basic spelling or object-oriented code, learning games are potent experience engines that immerse and engage the learner. There are even some cases where that immersion can be quite literal. Take, for instance, Aquation, the new Freshwater Access Game from the Smithsonian Institute that’s designed to…

October 2, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Making Games that Learn

There’s a lot we can learn playing games – from Newtonian physics to object-oriented coding, games can make us more capable and more informed. But here’s a thought that might sound a little ridiculous: what can games learn from us? According to today’s article from Fast Company, Unity Technologies is looking to answer that very question. Yesterday…

September 20, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Filament Games | Educational Game Developers

Augmented Reality and Training

We’ve been talking a lot about VR lately, but the world of XR content and experiences is wide and inclusive of mixed reality (MR), augmented reality (AR), and more, each with its own set of strengths and applications. MR is a broad term that describes content situated “anywhere between the extrema of the virtuality continuum”[1].…

September 18, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Game-Based Learning Research Roundup 2017

As game-based learning finds its way into the mainstream of teaching modalities, questions about efficacy will naturally start to surface. Fortunately, there’s a significant amount of research available to help drive this conversation in a positive direction, and more research gets generated and highlighted every year. To help you sort through it all, we’ve assembled…

September 11, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Unity for Education – An Interview with Jessica Lindl

The Filament Games blog team recently sat down to talk with Jessica Lindl, Global Head of Education at Unity, to talk through their plans and aspirations around the education industry. Here’s what she had to say: Tell us about yourself. What’s your professional background? I’ve spent my entire career in Education. From the beginning, I’ve…

September 6, 2017 // Brandon Pittser

Museums and Interactivity at the New York Hall of Science

The State of the Art This is an amazing time to be creating media for museums and other informal learning spaces. I’m the creative producer at the NY Hall of Science (NYSCI). I came to NYSCI in 2011 to work on Connected Worlds, a 2400 square foot immersive, interactive space created by Design I/O. The…

August 28, 2017 // Geralyn Abinader

Speed Sketch! Character Concept – Hot Dog Hawk

Character concepting is always a fun exercise – whether your character is serious, silly, or something in between, bringing a new character to life is a thought-provoking endeavor with lots of little details to consider. We wanted to unpack this process, so Game Art Team Lead Natasha Soglin crafted the speed sketch below, in which…

August 22, 2017 // Natasha Soglin

The Return of the Learning Games

At the recent Games for Change Festival, Constance Steinkuehler displayed Gartner’s time-honored “hype cycle” and posited that learning games are somewhere on the Slope of Enlightenment (likely closer to the Trough than the Plateau). The Game Based Learning (GBL) space is idiosyncratic and will likely have a unique adoption curve (including multiple hype cycles), but…

August 16, 2017 // Dan White

What We Mean When We Say AI: Understanding Types of AI

How to Bring Games to Your Classroom in 2024

Great Games that Teach Programming