A comprehensive study of the connection game genre, Connection Games provides a survey of known connection games while exploring common themes and strategies. This book aims to impose some structure on this increasingly large family of games, and to define exactly what constitutes a connection game. Key games are examined in detail and complete rules for over 200 connection games and variants are provided. A connection game is a board game in which players vie to develop or complete a specific type of connection with their pieces. This might involve forming a path between two or more goals, completing a closed loop, or gathering all pieces together into a single connected group.

A comprehensive study of the connection game genre, Connection Games provides a survey of known connection games while exploring common themes and strategies. This book aims to impose some structure on this increasingly large family of games, and to define exactly what constitutes a connection game. Key games are examined in detail and complete rul

Principles for designing educational games that integrate content and play and create learning experiences connecting to many areas of learners' lives. Too often educational videogames are narrowly focused on specific learning outcomes dictated by school curricula and fail to engage young learners. This book suggests another approach, offering a guide to designing games that integrates content and play and creates learning experiences that connect to many areas of learners' lives. These games are not gamified workbooks but are embedded in a long-form experience of exploration, discovery, and collaboration that takes into consideration the learning environment. Resonant Games describes twenty essential principles for designing games that offer this kind of deeper learning experience, presenting them in connection with five games or collections of games developed at MIT's educational game research lab, the Education Arcade. Each of the games—which range from Vanished, an alternate reality game for middle schoolers promoting STEM careers, to Ubiquitous Bio, a series of casual mobile games for high school biology students—has a different story, but all spring from these fundamental assumptions: honor the whole learner, as a full human being, not an empty vessel awaiting a fill-up; honor the sociality of learning and play; honor a deep connection between the content and the game; and honor the learning context—most often the public school classroom, but also beyond the classroom.

Coalition and Connection in Games: Problems of Modern Game Theory using Methods Belonging to Systems Theory and Information Theory focuses on coalition formation and on connections occurring in games, noting the use of mathematical models in the evaluation of processes involved in games. The book first takes a look at the process of strategy in playing games in which the conditional choices of players are noted. The sequence of decisions during the playing of games and observance of the rules are emphasized. The text also ponders on the mathematical tool of game theory in which the differences in the playing of games is seen as influenced by the number of players involved. The manuscript reviews how the von Neumann-Morgenstern theory is used in measuring the conditions on how games are played. The theory points out that games with more than two players call for the introduction of concepts and an instrument in comparison with two-person zero-sum games. The text also underscores the tendency of players to obtain a large share of the payoff, whether playing by themselves or participating in coalitions. The book is a fine reference for readers interested in the analysis of game theories.

A unique book providing a tour through the fascinating connections between mathematics and games.

How making and sharing video games offer educational benefits for coding, collaboration, and creativity. Over the last decade, video games designed to teach academic content have multiplied. Students can learn about Newtonian physics from a game or prep for entry into the army. An emphasis on the instructionist approach to gaming, however, has overshadowed the constructionist approach, in which students learn by designing their own games themselves. In this book, Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke discuss the educational benefits of constructionist gaming—coding, collaboration, and creativity—and the move from “computational thinking” toward “computational participation.” Kafai and Burke point to recent developments that support a shift to game making from game playing, including the game industry's acceptance, and even promotion, of “modding” and the growth of a DIY culture. Kafai and Burke show that student-designed games teach not only such technical skills as programming but also academic subjects. Making games also teaches collaboration, as students frequently work in teams to produce content and then share their games with in class or with others online. Yet Kafai and Burke don't advocate abandoning instructionist for constructionist approaches. Rather, they argue for a more comprehensive, inclusive idea of connected gaming in which both making and gaming play a part.