September 16th was our second class meeting. We discussed the previously found games (Life on the Edge, Lightning Librarian, Heating Plastics, Walking with Dinosaurs, Can you fill it?, Oil God) and there was general consensus that it was difficult to make an educational game that was both fun and informative. Each student also presented a little information about the game that they had found. I think that this was a very successful exercise.

This week we talked a little more about the game design process Elyse and I had developed over the summer. We wanted to make sure that students would stay on track as well as really highlight the learning aspects of their game. The exercise for next week is to post two facts about frogs and describe how they would explain them to our target age group (5-10 year olds). Our purpose behind this is to get the students thinking about the age of the players, but also to ask them to approach the frog facts in a manner that does not involve words, since the previous experience with the other educational games demonstrated to all of us that large blocks of text are basically ignored.

The final part of the exercise was to play two more games (Ayiti, Darfur is Dying) and to answer the question, "What is the difference between serious games and entertaining games?". They were also asked to compare one of those games to something they would consider entertaining.