Physics Games

I'm delivering an IWB in Science day in London tomorrow and I have been looking around for any new science websites that I might have missed. So I was really pleased to have stumbled upon Physics Games.net this morning.

Physics Games.net provides nearly 50 different flash-based games, all collected onto the one site. A few of these games, like Magic Pen and Fantastic Contraption, I have seen before on other sites, but it's nice to have one place to bookmark to get them all in the same place. There are quite a few games here I hadn't seen before. Physics teachers should definitely add this site to their favourites.

Most of the games are puzzle-type games that draw on aspect of physics - many would be useful to illustrate forces or gravity.

The site also provides embed codes for the different games so you can embed them into your own school website or VLE. There are some fun games there, and even if you don't end up using them in a lesson, there are some fiendishly addictive puzzle games there. Check it out today.

Jeopardy

A quick post about a free resource that will be of interest to anyone who likes to use quizzes as lesson starters or as a plenary.

Stu's Double Jeopardy is a free piece of software that will run on any computer and can be used with any IWB or even just with a projector. It allows you to build your own versions of the Jeopardy game show based on your own subject to use with your class. The game allows you to customise all the questions, and to have up to 6 teams playing at the same time.

You can use the built-in question editor, or even produce the questions in an Excel template and paste them into the question editor.

A really nice touch with the latest version is that you can even install the software onto a USB stick so you can play it on any computer just by plugging your USB stick into that machine. This is great for those of you teach in many different rooms - you dont have to install it on many different computers (or who have computers that are locked down by the IT technician)

Stu's Double Jeopardy looks like a really useful resource and again, like all my favourite resources it's free (but Stu does accept donations if you like it!)

You can get the latest version, and find out more about the software, here.

http://jeopardygame.wordpress.com/

Right, I'm off to BETT. Hoping to report on some nice new stuff when I get back.

TeacherLED resources

Thanks to Jim over at Teachers Love Smartboards for reminding me about the Teacher LED site.

If you haven't seen it before, there are some great Flash resources on there. Mainly for Numeracy, but also a great little scrollable world map for geography.

There's also a nice Flash version of the Blockbusters game show. Very nice, and more interactive than my static version. You need to read out the questions yourself - but you could just use the glossary from any textbook or a list of subject keywords. The quiz can be adapted for any subject you want and would make a great lesson starter or plenary.

It's a great little resource, and well worth a visit: http://www.teacherled.com/

Spore

This week, I have been playing a lot of Spore. Purely for educational reasons I can assure you :) OK, I'm playing it as a game geek - but I think there is some potential there for some use in the classroom.

A long time ago, I remember a colleague of mine using Sim Life in the classroom to introduce the idea of adaptation and survival. It wasn't the most sophisticated game by todays standards, but was kinda fun.

Spore takes all this to a whole new level. The game itself has been sold as an "evolution game" but to be honest it's not really evolution. The fact that you are in control of designing your creature through a lot of the game and can add and remove body parts at will makes it more "Intelligent Design in a Can"


I'm currently in the Space stage of the game, having taken my mini-cellular creature all the way into space. This stage is taking ages to play and there's no way it could be done in the classroom.

The aspect of the game that could be useful in class could be the Creature Creator. You can download a standalone version of this for a £5 or a trial version of this for free.

The creature creator lets you design different animals which you can then put into your world. It would be good to ask pupils to design a herbivore - or the perfect carnivore. Design an animal for a hot climate or a cold climate etc. They could then take a screenshot, paste into a word processor/presentation tool and explain why they designed it the way they did. What features make it a good herbivore/carnivore etc.
I haven't used this in the classroom myself, but I have heard of some teachers who have been trying this out. If you have, please leave a comment.

In the meantime, here's a little widget that shows you all my Spore creations.




I've been messing about trying to recreate the Starship Enterprise and an X-Wing fighter. Battlestar Galatica is more of a challenge :) Here's my Spore profile page.

Crickweb

Here's a great site that all primary/elementary teachers who use interactive whiteboards should have bookmarked.

A former colleague of mine, Dan Bunker, has produced a fantastic library of Flash resources for many curriculum subjects plus some generic fun Flash games. There's over 160 resources on the site available to use.

There are also 16 Promethean flipchart files that ActivPrimary users can download and use on their whiteboard.

There are resources for Early Years classes as well as Key stages 1 and 2.

I thoroughly recommend the Crickweb site, there's certainly a lot of resources there and you should find plenty of things that you could use as lesson starters or as part of a plenary.

Magic Pen Game

No, not related to my earlier post about the Smart Magic Pen, but more related to my post about Phun the other week.

Thanks to Science Punk for linking to another fun little Real Physics application called Magic Pen.

Magic Pen is like Phun in that you use a crayon to draw objects that then behave on the screen as if they were real. Balls roll, oblongs topple down under gravity etc. This time, there's an actual objective. You need to get the little ball to the flag. You might need to just roll a ball into it to make it move, or you could build a more complex solution.

It's very neat, and would be great on an IWB as a lesson starter activity.

Play Magic Pen here: http://magic.pen.fizzlebot.com/