A very helpful snippet from the book is a chart (on page 16) showing how games have evolved in four different stages, with ever greater levels of interactivity, immersion, complexity, and collaboration. This was an eye-opener for me, as the level of mental dexterity has ramped up over the years, requiring higher-level thinking and learning patterns.
From a corporate training perspective, the case study of visual job aids as a replacement for printed SOPs (pages 136-138) was a fascinating application of technology to a real training problem. This was one of many illustrative stories sprinkled throughout the book that increased its practical value.
For any serious training professional dealing with the issue of incorporating the newer generation of workers into a company, I highly recommend this volume. It is not overburdened with academic abstractions; in fact, the book is loaded with practical suggestions, including ways to introduce these new styles of learning into a resistant corporate culture.
I found only one frustration with the book, which is that its overall length and thoroughness (a real strength!) may restrict its readership. That’s a shame, because there is some very valuable insight here.
Third the book made the cover of Pfeiffer's spring catalog...however, it was the wrong book cover (the green one that didn't make it). The blue one over on the right side of this blog is the cover that will ultimately be on the book as I have been told.
When I was in graduate school many moons ago, the big thing was virtual reality. The concept was that the learner would immerse him or herself into an environment and then interact with the environment. It was really over-hyped and never went anywhere.
track hand movements and translate them into computer instructions. The presenter will have his or her hands in the air and the slides will progress. Not unlike the work by Jeff Han which I highlighted in What Interface?
The tennis, baseball and bowling are highly realistic and provide a great deal of fun and interesting game play.It is the first video game console system that my wife actually enjoys playing.
Over at Learning Visions, Cammy Bean posted an entry titled Games for Girls… there she discusses the fact that it seems that girls aren’t really gamers. I encounter that thought a great deal when I talk to groups about the gamers and how they like to learn. 
that specifically addresses that issue. Here is an excerpt:Unfortunately, female involvement in video games tends to go unnoticed—even among themselves. As Kirsten Kearney, a video game industry journalist puts it, “I started off playing Pong 25 years ago, then I had a GameBoy and played SuperMario. There are plenty of girls who did this but when you ask if they are gamers they say no," Nikki Douglas, founder of www.grrlgamer.com, a site dedicated to girl gamers adds, “We know that women do play games…we have played hundreds upon hundreds of [video] games.”So, we as designers of educational or training games for learning need to remember that females like video games as much as males, they just tend to like different game play and different content. When designing instructional games, we need to keep this in mind and overcome the large mis-perception about females and video games.__
While not being as visible as their male counterparts, females are no strangers to the video game world. Seventy percent of the players of the social interaction game, The Sims, are women under 25. The computer game that held the number one position in the Children’s PC chart from May 2004 until July 2006 was designed specifically for girls age six to eleven. In that popular game, Princess Fashion Boutique
A game that has been a hit with older females is Nintendo’s Nintendogs. This game allows players to “pick out a puppy, name it and then watch it interact with other dogs." Forty-two percent of Nintendogs purchasers are women, with over 700,000 copies of the game sold over the first two months in Japan. When the game hit the United States, it sold 250,000 copies the first week and sold out of two major computer game store chains within a month.
Increasingly, females are playing first person shooter games as well. In fact, there are several female-only game tournaments started by women for women. Web sites such as www.womengamers.com, www.ladygamers.com,and www.grrlgamer.com have sprung up to eliminate the stereotype of girls not playing video games.
Females are active participants in video games; they are learning the same traits, concepts and behaviors as their male counterparts when it comes to the influence of video games. While females tend to gravitate toward different types of games, the lessons learned; problem-solving, the benefits of exploration, the advantages of multiple attempts are all the same. When discussing the traits of gamers, the traits cut across genders because young girls play video games and are growing up in a culture influenced by those games.
I've been a fan of Jellyvision's You Don't Know Jack for a while, my first CD of the game had the following system requirements:
Remember School House Rock? It was a fun, interesting way to learn the boring aspects of conjunctions, how a bill becomes a law and multiplication tables (remember 3 is a magic number.) 
The school is typical, desks all in a row, highly structured activities and kids bored out of their minds. 
If you were born in 1994, you have grown up with the Internet, video games and the cell phone. To you, these are not new inventions, they have always been around.
As you turn 13 this year you have been surfing the internet, collaborating with friends, and playing video games your entire life.
In fact, 44% of you own a computer AND a cell phone or PDA. Thirteen year olds call "email" snail mail. They even wonder aloud if land line phones aren't "obsolete."
Designers and developers of instruction are not digital natives, we have not grown up with this technology, we learned it along the way. We have trouble thinking like digital natives, we try but are not always successful.
To better create instruction in the future, we need to immerse ourselves in the gadgets, games and gizmos of the digital natives while simultenously enlisting them to help us create learning events and assets that they find relevant.
Look at your learning and development team. How old is the youngest member? Can you get an intern from college or better high school or middle school to help you think about the future of learning?
At 13, in a mere five years the first all-net, all-video game, all-cellphone connected generation hits the workforce...is your organization ready?
See Defining a Gamer for more information and discussion on this topic.
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Recommended Games and Gadgets
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Content Guide
, 2002
and came across the section about DIY Legos and so I went to the web site to check it out. Awesome! 
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