Mini Games

I spotted this on OLDaily – and looking at the conclusion…

Mini-games are fast becoming an effective and relevant method to deliver game-based instruction. They should no longer be considered as just simple quiz-style games embedded in a conventional course to break up the monotony of the information. While they certainly can be included in a web-based course, they can also be delivered in the context of a larger game or simulation, or combined with other mini-games to build a training experience with greater depth and breadth than was previously possible. Furthermore, mini-games have become sophisticated enough to stand on their own as a legitimate method of training and education.

… I like the idea of stringing these small chunks of novelty together into a larger whole. Entertainment oriented games have been doing the mini game thing for a while and even though Nintendo has made a mint on it, I haven’t really seen much from people doing educational mini games. Of course, this might be semantics – we might have strung together a farm sim with a peace maker game and used it to deliver concepts in a course before but I don’t think I’ve seen anything calling these individual object “mini games” yet. To borrow a term from my Education training, the mini games are essentially manipulatives then that help students “play with the idea”. While doesn’t seem convinced by the cognitive grounding, I think it makes sense – if you take a bit of a K-12 view of the games.