• English
• German
• French
• Spanish
• Russian
• Romanian

English

New Game Making Software Engages a New Generation of Learners

Philadelphia, Pa – Multimedia Science’s newly released Version 5 of the Categories Game Maker software helps teachers create games well suited to today’s learners.

Many teachers feel that students have short attention spans and an obsession with their iPods and video games. Multimedia Science designed the Categories Game Maker software to allow teachers to create review and assessment games in the classroom that engage students by using graphics, animations, and movies. And the new software makes both making and playing the games as simple as possible.

Children today have been brought up in a culture filled with visual media, both on television and now with the instant information gratification of the Internet. As noted in the Educase Review article What Today’s Learners Demand, “They certainly don’t have short attention spans for their games, movies, music, or Internet surfing.” The article goes on to say that students today are saying, “engage me or enrage me.”

In addition, there are many studies which point out that the majority of students, around 65% are primarily visual learners, with roughly another 30% being auditory learners. So, it is no wonder that review sessions based on calling out questions and projecting text based questions on a screen are not very engaging.

With the Categories Game Maker, teachers can create questions for these visual learners using not only text, but also graphics, animations, and movies. And for the auditory learners, sound can be added as well. There can be up to seven categories with ten questions in each category.

A number of tools are included to help teachers create visual questions including the multiple choice question maker and the free form question maker, both allowing the inclusion of both text and graphics.

When playing a Categories game, the class can be broken up into as many as ten teams, and teams can be selected in a number of ways, with or without a timer. The game keeps track of everything, the team names, the questions asked, the score, and the game can be saved to be completed at a later time. This allows teachers to enjoy playing the game with their classes.

One of the teacher testers, Douglas Meade, comments, “I kept using the software and making suggestions and Multimedia Science just kept making the changes that I asked for. The latest version makes it both easy to create and fun to play the games.”

A free demo of The Categories Game Maker, along with a number of other free teacher tools, can be found at: http://www.multimediascience.com