The DfES Games Summit today at the Royal Garden Hotel proved to be a very interesting and thought provoking session. There were some short presentations from Caspian Learning, Dave Whyley from Wolverhampton LA and Relentless Software. The last presentation by Relentless had me really excited…
The games for the PS2 are in my opinion just superb. I’ve talked about Guitar Hero, Dance Mats and Eye Toy quite a lot in this blog but there’s a new kid in town and it’s called Buzz and it really is incredible. It’s based on quiz formats that are commonly seen on a range of TV shows and it comes with four controllers that hook up to the PS2. There is a range of games available for Buzz: a music quiz, a general knowledge quiz and a game called Jungle Party (which we have at the Consolarium and more will be blogged about this soon). But today we learned about Buzz: The Schools’ Quiz that has been commissioned and will be due for release mid-2007.
We saw a short video of it in action at Terra Nova Primary School and it was a sight to behold. The kids in that class had been put in teams and they were answering questions that had been covered in a recent Environmental Studies project. They engagement was there to be seen. Unfortunately the presentation had to be cut short but it was clear from the video how the dynamic nature of group involvement within the context of Buzz engaged, excited and challenged the children. We need to get our hands on this and see how much we really know about rivers, weather systems and transportation! Maybe the kids would beat us in this context.
Naturally the commission for this product was aimed at the English curriculum so it would be really good if we could make representation to Relentless to ask them about creating a Scottish version. My initial observation of the game was that it would not allow you to edit content hence the need to possibly tweak it to suit our particular needs.
This appears to be a really innovative product and I look forward to getting my hands on it.
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