The Serious
Games Association announced the winners of the 2014 International Serious Play Awards, which recognize exceptional titles for game-based
learning or training in business, education and healthcare.
Schell Games earned one of the first
place Gold medals for Inklings, an ELA game they developed for Amplify.
The other Gold
first place titles were:
Planet
Jockey, Planet Jockey (Business)
Gate,
Learning Games Lab, New Mexico State University (Education)
Change
Talk: Childhood Obesity, Kognito (Healthcare)
Inklings: Underground is an action game, for iOS and Android, in which players advance by
digging through a series of caves, purifying “corrupt” soil by learning and
using morphemes to fix broken words and sentences.
The purpose
of Inklings is to teach middle school children in grades 6 through 8 the
basics of morphology. Essentially, the game educates students on prefixes and
suffixes in relation to root words.
In the
game, the player must help Blott, the Inkling. Inklings are inky, resourceful
mole-like creatures that live below the ground in the literary world. Blott
must work tirelessly to revitalize and maintain the dense and perilous Verbose
Underground. The object of the game is to guide Blott to caverns to collect
crystals and unlock the level; however, the paths to the caverns are often
blocked. Blott must repair corrupted words or sentences to unblock the paths to
the caverns in order to reach the crystals and unlock the level.
The first 4
levels of the game are tutorial in nature. As players progress through the
levels, they are introduced to more sophisticated gameplay and a higher degree
of difficulty in word pairings.
The
assessment element of the game is rather sophisticated, accurately
tracking/measuring three game dimensions: level completion, degree of “energy”
sustained at level completion (meaning that player has made the best possible
choices among the available learning pathways) and word mastery.
As
players can complete each level without achieving word mastery or sustaining
the amount of energy, the combination of the three dimensions represents an
ample amount of timely feedback.
Inklings allows students to recognize patterns and series in word parts, identifying
improperly affixed pairings and nonsense words, and becoming increasingly
familiar with common word parts in the English language. With these skills,
students can further develop their ability to make inferences about unknown
words based on their knowledge of the root, the affix and its context within a
sentence.
About
Amplify
Amplify
is the education division of the media conglomerate News Corp.
Headquartered
in New York City and with more than 1,000 employees across the country, Amplify
is led by a team of digital education experts and has provided industry-leading
instructional tools, data analytics and assessment solutions to the K-12 market
for more than a decade as Wireless Generation.
As a major
part of its effort to reinvent the elementary and secondary school curriculum, Amplify
is producing an ambitious portfolio of Serious Games, including ones for
English Language Arts and STEM. The games are being conceptualized and
developed by leading independent game designers as well as veterans of top
commercial game studios, like Schell Games.
***
2014 International Serious
Play Awards Winners Full List (including Small Studio Awards)
2014 Gold Winners
Planet Jockey
Planet
Jockey (Business, Professional)
Gate
Learning
Games Lab, New Mexico State University (Education, Professional)
Inklings
Schell
Games and Amplify (Education, Professional)
Change Talk: Childhood Obesity
Kognito
(Healthcare, Professional)
Play the Past
Minnesota
Historical Society (Museum, Small Studio)
Slice Fractions
Ululab
(Education, Small Studio)
World Agent BRAC
MiCMALi
(Games for Good, Small Studio)
Miralab
University
of Southern California (Education, Student)
Chained
DigiPen
Institute of Technology (Games for Good, Student)
Thralled
University
of Southern California (Games for Good, Student)
2014 Silver Winners
Field Level Risk Assessment
Serious
Labs, Inc. (Business, Professional)
Crafty Cut
Preloaded
and Amplify (Education, Professional)
Story Cards
Preloaded
and Amplify (Education, Professional)
Nutrition GameScape
Toolwire
(Education, Professional)
The Underground Railroad:
Journey to Freedom
National
Geographic Education and Muzzy Lane Software (Education, Small Studio)
Hungry Birds
Digital
Glass (Museum, Small Studio)
DragonBox Elements
wewanttoknow
(Education, Small Studio)
Marketing Mayhem
University
of Roehampton Business School (Business, Small Studio)
Nurture Your Nature
Oregon
Health & Science University (Healthcare, Student)
The World the Children Made
Miami
University of Ohio (Games for Good, Student)
For the Records
DePaul
University, CDM (Games for Good, Student)
2014 Bronze Winners
Lifting With Scissors
Serious
Labs, Inc. (Business, Professional)
Extrasolar
Lazy 8
Studios (Education, Professional)
Atlantis Remixed: The Mystery
of Taiga River
E-Line
Media (Education, Professional
C0d3bre4k3rs
Strange
Loop Games and Amplify (Education, Small Studio)
Perfect Woman
Perfect
Woman (Games for Good, Small Studio)
Global Treasure Apps / Garden
Sanssouci
Frances
O’Neill (Museum, Small Studio)
The Beer Cup: An AB InBev
Challenge
Evviva
Games (Business, Small Studio)
Alternative History
University
of Southern California (Education, Student)
Far From Home
University
of Abertay Dundee (Games for Good, Student)
Migration
University
of Southern California (Games for Good, Student)