The Diabetic Dog Game Review

I was excited today to learn that there is an entire section of the Nobel Prize website dedicated to free educational games focused towards the Nobel Prize winning discoveries. While most of my colleagues take their mental breaks throughout the day by playing ping pong, chess or Android-based versions of Scrabble, I spent my day experimenting with various Nobel Prize games. While a few of the first ones I tried out suffered from some common education game mistakes (for one, the learning content was mostly separate from the actual gameplay while another was simply badly explained and difficult to play), I was relatively impressed with The Diabetic Dog game.

The game asks you to take care of a virtual dog with diabetes. Many of the elements are the same as with any other virtual pet game--the dog needs to be fed, walked and petted throughout the day (as measured in the game--this is not one of the more realistic pet simulators performed in real time). He begs for food, pouts when he doesn't receive enough attention, and is generally a pretty cute cartoon dog. Added to these standard elements, however, is one significant change: the blood sugar monitor in the lower left. In addition to feeding, petting and walking your dog at the appropriate times, you need to keep his blood sugar as close to normal as possible. The closer you keep your dog's blood sugar level to normal, the more you are paid at the end of the day, and you can use the money to buy your dog food and accessories.

The diabetes-related portion of the game seems relatively accurate, although admittedly I have no real-life experience with diabetes to do a detailed comparison. You can choose from multiple different foods to give your dog, each of which has a different effect on the dog's blood sugar. Insulin affects blood sugar (although there is little guidance about the amount of insulin to give beyond the response of the blood sugar bar) as does walking the dog (although in game, it is not very clear whether it is the exercise affecting your dog's blood sugar or simply the time passing while you walk him). At the beginning of the game you are provided with some text-based instructions for caring for your dog, both in general and specifically related to the dog's diabetes. You can access these instructions at any time. In addition, if you are struggling with the game, hints appear several times before you finally fail. When you do fail, your dog is taken to the hospital and you are no longer allowed to own him. A list of resources appears to help you learn about diabetes and your dog in specific.

At the end of each day, you are provided with a summary of your performance. Several factors are included, from your ability to keep your dog healthy to the amount of attention you gave him. Money is given based on your performance, which you can use the next day to buy food and accessories for the dog.

At any time, you can choose to save the game. Your dog's name is unique, so you can come back to play again at any time. The only exception to this is if you fail to keep your dog healthy--in this case, your dog ownership is revoked and you will need to start a new game.

For a very simple game, The Diabetic Dog game seems to be both educational and relatively fun for the right audience. It is a good way to learn the basics about managing diabetes, although it would be beneficial for teachers to provide some additional context and information. As a virtual pet game, the Diabetic Dog has some great potential for teaching elementary to middle school students, especially girls (audiences where virtual pets are commonly enjoyed). Older players may be bored quickly, and while some boys may enjoy the game, others may struggle with the caregiver role. It is a relatively straightforward game that can be played free through the Internet with relatively little additional instructional development or time. The game is easy to play regardless of your level of experience with games, so that the majority of the challenge for any student should be focused on balancing their dog's blood sugar levels.

Cisco Binary Game Review

A few months ago, I found out that Cisco had created a set of online games to help people achieve Cisco certification. Since I've always heard from those at my work that Cisco certifications can be very difficult, expensive and time consuming, I was very interested. Unfortunately the few times I tried to access the games, there were troubles with the site and I wasn't able to. This is why I was so excited to find the Cisco Binary Game listed on the Serious Game Classification website.

This game is another drill-style game, continually providing the player with a serious of problems based on binary math. The player is either given a total and asked to select the options that would create that total using binary math, or is given a row of selected bits and asked to calculate the total. As time progresses, the problems become harder and appear faster. If you answer a problem that row disappears; if the screen fills up with problems, you lose the game.

While the screen filling up with new problems (which reminded me vaguely of Tetris) and music added a slightly more interesting dimention, I still felt like I was using flashcards to practice binary math. This game can be a good way to drill students on binary math problems, I didn't find that the gameplay interface added anything. Also, after completing a few levels I found like my biggest challenge was being able to physically click the buttons fast enough to keep the screen from filling up--and that's coming from someone who has never officially learned binary math and in fact has spent the last 8 years avoiding math in the liberal arts!

The primary use I can see for this game is to let computer science or math students practice math, and specifically practice being able to answer problems based on binary very quickly. I wouldn't use the game as an introduction to binary math for younger students as I think the pace of the game could cause some problems, and I also wouldn't necessarily use it for advanced students, as they might get bored very easily in the early levels. Essentially, I think this game is useful for practicing binary math drills for students who understand the basics of the problems and simply need to practice quick thinking.

Free Rice Online Game

Free Rice is a free basic drill trivia game where players can choose to answer trivia questions from a variety of topics ranging from English (or Spanish, Italian, German and French) vocabulary to chemistry symbols, famous painters and their works, or multiplication tables. For each question that the player gets right, the website donates 10 grains of rice to hungry people through the World Food Programme. You can play casually by just going to the website http://www.freerice.com/ or you can choose to log in, which allows you to track your record with the game and create groups. There are even leaderboards available through the Rice link on the top of the page, allowing you to see the top players and the number of grains of rice they have donated.

As a game, I can't say that Free Rice was extremely captivating to me. After trying a few different subjects, I still found myself essentially answering online quiz questions for a variety of subjects by clicking the correct multiple choice answer. If you answer a question wrong, the game gives you the answer and the question nearly always comes up again after a few questions.The element that makes Free Rice into more than any other trivia-style game is absolutely the fact that with each correct answer, you are doing some measurable good by donating food to needy people. While the donation is only 10 grains per answer, as you answer questions you can see the level of rice in your bowl grow and that really does become addictive.  I continually found myself thinking that this game wasn't much different than just answering review questions--except that I was not preparing for any quiz, and I kept answering questions until about 300 grains of rice after I had decided this game wasn't helping me learn anything new. Actually, I switched the category to Spanish vocabulary (I haven't taken a Spanish class in about 12 years) to give myself a little more of a challenge, and kept going!

Overall, Free Rice is an extremely simple trivia game with the added element of donating food to hungry people. The trivia portion of the game may help some, but there isn't any way to customize which questions appear beyond selecting a category, which may still have broader questions than you need. For example, if you're trying to prepare students for a vocabulary quiz, you have no way to make sure the game asks about specific vocabulary words. With a more limited set like chemistry symbols or multiplication tables I could see the drill feature of this game having more of an application.

To make the best use out of Free Rice, I think an instructor would need to focus some portion of the lesson around the feature of donating food. You could have the class do research about how much rice the class would need to donate to feed a family or about some of the countries where the rice could be donated to and their situations. Alternatively, you could use Free Rice to learn about teamwork and the difference that a team can make as opposed to an individual, by creating a group and examining the totals. For teaching about generosity and good citizenship, you could use this game as one example of the diverse ways that people can help others, and even do some research about how Free Rice was created or who sponsors them. While you could always have the freedom simply to use Free Rice as a trivia game to test student knowledge of specific facts, I think that using it in this way would add very little educational value and would really miss on the biggest potential of the game. Free Rice could potentially be used for any age group, although the trivia questions are largely focused towards subjects that would be taught in K-12 classes.