Teachers make 3D Games

Teachers make 3D Games

Thanks to some exciting new technology out of Singapore we should be seeing more games in classrooms in the near future.

A recently concluded month long national interschool 3D games for learning competition, for teachers, was organized by Playware Studio and was co-sponsored by Singtel and Microsoft Singapore.

The novel contest required teachers to design and create 3D Games for learning using the 3D Hive rapid game development platform. Participants attended an intensive 3 hour workshop prior to the competition to learn how to use the platform.

Ms Faith Goh from River Valley High School won the grand prize in the inaugural national interschool 3D games for learning design competition. Ms Goh also won the special prize for the best 3D Game for learning (languages category).

The first and second runners up prizes went to Mr. Liu Peng from Canberra primary School and Mr. Zulkifli Mansor from Gongshang Primary School respectively. Other prize winning entries were from teams from Madrasah Al-Arabiah Al-Islamiah, Greenridge Primary School, Tampines Secondary School and Anglican High School.  

Games are an exciting new medium for education engaging students and making them into self-directed and motivated learners. In the recent years over 300 research papers have been published, to show the effectiveness of games as a teaching and learning medium.

However up till now the cost of using games in the classroom was too prohibitive for it to be rational for teachers to adopt them. 

3DHive is a new patent pending platform developed by Playware Studios under the Future Schools at Singapore initiative by Infocomm Development Authority and the Ministry of Education, Singapore. 

It is a platform that allows teachers and students to create 3D Games without the need to learn computer programming or scripting. The platform not only drastically reduces the effort and time required to create games but also provides a unique and inexpensive cloud based hosting service for multiplayer games.