Alice announced on her fantastic Wonderland blog the start of a new project Channel 4 Education did together with Welcome Trust and Oil Productions.
Today, dear students, we’ll be learning about DNA and genome, the fun way. By playing Routes.

The 8-week during game will contain a lot of platforms as players play mini-games (obviously), solve puzzles and watch comedian Katherine Ryan as she discovers what exactly defines who she is. Is it our genes, or does our environment play a bigger role there?

They kick off with a first mini-game where you get an organism. When breeding with other players, your organism evolves, creating a lineage you can look back upon.  You can show off your organism by using widgets like the one below:

Feel free to breed, but please, be gentle ;)

For those looking for a bit more challenge, the real game starts on monday and there will be prizes ;)

I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. Using games to educate people is a strategy not explored enough and hugely underestimated. On the other hand, I can imagine projects like these don’t come cheap so my hat of to Channel 4 for seeing the value of this.

The British Red Cross

The game tells the story of Joseph. War in Northern Uganda has pulled him from his family. Finding the Red Cross is the only way to know whether his mother is dead or alive.

The game launched with the following video:

Register at the game’s site and wait for a mail from Joseph. A little tip: watch your spamfilter, mine took it.

More info on the how and why of the game can be found at (the by the way very interesting) Eliane’s Future-Making Serious Games. And, as usual, unforums are on the game!

The year is 2019. Human kind is facing extinction by 2042 if we don’t act now.

That is what the new game by IFTF (The Institute Of The Future), Superstruct, is all about.

They like to describe it as follows:

Superstruct is the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. By playing the game, you’ll help us chronicle the world of 2019–and imagine how we might solve the problems we’ll face. Because this is about more than just envisioning the future. It’s about making the future, inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.

Join up and create yourself in the future, as you see yourself in 2019. This future you will have to focus on the superthreaths to mankind: Ravenous, Quarantine, Outlaw, Planet, Power Struggle and Generation Exile. After checking out the introduction movie for each superthreat it’s time to act.

For explaining how the game is played, I once again turn to the FAQ:

Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it’s like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we’ll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.

Sounds like a very interesting project of what collaborative storytelling could bring. Those interested in playing the game should start over here. Better hurry up though, the game started the 6th of October and ends the 17th of November. At the end of the game, people over at IFTF (under the name of The Ten Year Forecast team) will start gathering everything the players generated and prepare an official Superstruct Report.

Can’t wait to see that one! But let’s play first, shall we ;)