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How to Add Value to Your Reader’s Experience with Augmented and Virtual Reality

If you are a traditional educational book publisher, you have most likely asked yourself if adding an Augmented or Virtual Reality component to your books is a wise investment. You’ve seen some impressive demos of characters coming to life in 3D from a page and you think “that’s cool!” But then you ask yourself, “what’s…

May 15, 2017 // Jennifer Javornik

Filament Games | Educational Game Developer

Alpha, Beta, Gold: A Commitment to High-quality Game Development

When I talk to prospective clients, I always try to KIJF (keep it jargon free). That being said, there are a few terms that are just helpful to know. In this post, we’ll look at each of the three release phases that make up a typical game development project with us: Alpha, Beta, and Gold…

May 10, 2017 // Jennifer Javornik

Sennett Middle School’s Gaming Club – Creating Game Art!

At a recent game development club we hosted at Sennett Middle School, the Filament Games team introduced students to video game art, which is an important component of any video game’s development. There are many different artistic styles developers can choose from, but we chose a style that’s both iconic and easy to learn: pixel…

April 27, 2017 // Elle Jacobson

Designing Games for Toys and Young Learners

I recently had the privilege of working with Square Panda to create learning games for youngsters to help teach them letters. They use a physical tray and a series of plastic letters that players can manipulate in real life to interact with the digital game on a tablet. It looks like this: Photo credit: Square Panda…

April 26, 2017 // Abby Friesen

Implementing and Evaluating Your District Game-based Learning Program

Last year we released the District Game-based Learning Implementation Guide to help administrators, Technology Directors, and Curriculum Specialists introduce game-based learning at a district-wide level. Since then, we’ve heard inspiring stories about how these game-based learning programs have engaged difficult to reach students, empowered educators, and inspired gaming clubs and projects! We thought it was…

March 27, 2017 // Kat Shanahan

10 Tips for Designing a Game Tutorial

Every game teaches you how to play. Plants vs. Zombies is an interesting case study because it made “hardcore” strategy content accessible to casual and non-gamers. Before Plants vs. Zombies the game industry had falsely concluded that the casual market just wasn’t interested in certain game genres. In addition to appealing to casual gamers, it…

March 16, 2017 // Stephen Calender

How to Make a Simple Project Shine

We make games! You already knew that because you’re reading our blog, but what you may not know is that we’ve partnered with a variety of organizations to design elegant platforms to house their games, apps, and other digital content. These projects have brought to light a number of design concepts that we wanted to…

March 8, 2017 // Madeline Folz

The 4 P’s of Designing Learning Games with Impact

iCivics is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinvigorating civic learning through interactive and engaging learning resources. Their platform has more than 7 million registered students and 100,000 registered teachers in all 50 United States. The article below is written by iCivics Director of Content Carrie Ray-Hill and shares valuable insights into creating mission-driven game-based learning tools.…

January 26, 2017 // Carrie Ray-Hill

How to Design the First Five Minutes of Your Game

A common request when pitching a game idea is “walk me through the first 5 minutes (or sometimes 30 seconds) of your game.” It is a question designed to weed out who has really thought out their ideas. The truth of the matter is that you need to convey a lot information concisely and elegantly…

January 23, 2017 // Stephen Calender

Preventing Defects And Defensive Programming

As programmers, we can embed fail-safes into our code. In essence, we get decide what failure looks like. As we are writing code we choose how rigorously we validate our work; for example, checking that values are not null, lists are not empty, or numbers stay within valid ranges. In the event that something bad…

January 11, 2017 // Stephen Calender

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