Educational Gaming Commons - Press Start

The EGC participated in the PSU Libraries 2009 Open House over the past several days. We had a booth in the main check-out area, and talked to quite a few students about educational gaming and the new EGC Lab. Wow - it's always good to talk to the students.

Day two of the event we brought in the new Beatles Rock Band. The Beatles are timeless, so it's maybe not so amazing that traditional age students know the tunes and the lyrics. We even had the Nittany Lion sit down at the drums for a song!

In addition, the EGC worked with the library to help conceptualize an Augmented Reality Game (ARG). The premise here was that our President, Graham Spanier (an amateur magician) was practicing a magic trick and it want awry, causing a Nittany Lion statue in the library to disappear. Your job in the ARG is to scour the library for clues that eventually lead you to a "reverse the spell" spell that bring the lion back. View the great intro video for the ARG done by the PSU Digital Media Commons.

Fun stuff, and if you complete the ARG you are entered for a prize drawing of a Dell laptop! So far 53 players have completed the ARG, with six days of play time remaining.

All told, this was great event, and I'm happy the EGC was invited to participate. It helps us keep current on student thoughts in the realm of gaming.