Sunday 5 March 2017

#100daysofvideogames Days 16 to 25

DAYS 16 TO 25
 
Another multiple update (busy week and no chance at all to write this, so I know I've missed lots of things out!)
 
There's been quite a lot of playing apps together, either helping each other learn each other's favourites or competing on scores. Steps, Pen Pineapple Pen, Six!, and Mario Run have featured highly in this! 
(Hand eye coordination, team work, numeracy, problem solving)
 
 



Pokémon Go has been played a few times this week by Squidge and Moppet, with a lot of reading names, comparing CPs, and checking how long until eggs hatch. 
(Numeracy, literacy, achieving goals)
 
 

We saw Ben Garrod in So you think you know about dinosaurs..? at the Stafford Gatehouse Theatre, and Sprout knew the answers to a lot of the questions from playing Primal.
(Prehistory, evolutionary biology)


Sprout turned eleven and requested a BoS cake, so I made him one, and I also managed to get Fallout cupcake toppers, so he enjoyed telling us all what each picture was of and the relevant power armour numbers.
(Mummy points, sharing information)
 

 

Moppet has been playing a few dress up apps, and has been asking a lot what different words say.
(Literacy, creativity)
 

We had a trip to the National Videogame Museum in Nottingham, where they played lots of new and retro games, and also took part in a Makey Makey workshop to make their own gaming controller.
(Technology, history, creativity, design, circuits, physics)
 



Sprout was watching some Piemations related to a game he'd been playing, and they made a comment about Stars and Stripes and hammer and sickle, so he looked some things up and then asked me the relevance, and we chatted briefly about the Cold War, communism, Russia and the USA.
(History, politics, making connections, finding information) 
 

Sprout started playing Animal Crossing New Leaf, and began by thinking of a town name; he wanted it to be made of two words, sound happy, have a last work that meant 'town', and there was a restriction that it could be no longer than eight letters. Lots of discussion later, he decided on Newfalls, and started catching lots of fish, making puns to me about their names.
(Literacy, numeracy)

Sprout and Squidge both downloaded Wallpaper Engine, and played with some graphic equaliser-type wallpapers with various tracks, some clock ones, some ones that created various types of patterns, and an animated DNA double helix. 
(Music, art, numeracy, biology)

Squidge recognised the title of a videogame in the background of an unrelated film that I was watching.
(Literacy)

Sprout came and chatted to me about some research some at Dartmouth a few years ago on rhesus macaques, which looked at their reactions to the colours red and blue. He then talked about some statistics shown on the Game Theory channel about the relative wins and losses of red and blue teams in various sports and videogames, telling me that he thought that it might be down to evolutionary psychology, with its roots possibly in the non-verbal origins of humanity, the appearance of red in nature as a warning sign, and maybe the fact that red is the colour of blood. He talked about the differences if a player is allocated or freely chooses red or blue, and reasons why he thought that all sports teams didn't just choose red strips. We talked about what other research could be done to narrow down whether the response to red vs blue is inherent or learned, such as experiments using various ages of children, and various nationalities. 
(Psychology, evolution, history, science)
 

Sprout played some Assassin's Creed, and then chatted to me about the eras in which the games in the series are set. We talked about the Middle Ages, Victorian times, when Big Ben was built/installed, and in what era steampunk was intended to be.
(History, art)
 
 
 
 
 Squidge completed his Minecraft and Overwatch multimedia pieces at art group too.