Serious Play: Kids and Machinima

Photo courtesy of Beth Kanter.

There is a lot of talk about gaming and education, but it's hard to find examples that are truly compelling. That being said, after reading Hugh's post, I was blown away by was the presence at the European Machinima Festival of a Global Kids project. They have been doing an amazing job in Second Life for almost 2 years now and they have the machinima and blogs to prove it! You can watch the machinima submission for yourself on youtube. Keep in mind this is a student production before you judge too harshly. The video was, above all, a neat exercise in storytelling.

I am sure I am not the only one seeing the implications of training young people to create movies inside games/online platforms. It's a good teaching tool for teaching writing, design/art, and becoming tech savvy. However, it also means that this initiative (and others like it) create a generation much more aware of machinima as a serious technique for self-expression and sharing ideas.

Along those lines, another interesting story emerges from Asia. Kids Movie Creator is a 3D content creation platform targeted at helping students of ages 7 through 12 design sets and produce movies in them. From what I see, the work posted on the site so far is limited to still photos, but I am looking forward to seeing their progress over time.

Machinima Europe Festival 07 & Machinma Festival 08

For those keeping track, some news to share on the festival front.

The 2007 Machinima Festival (North America) will be pushed into mid-2008, as we're still pulling together funding and partners for the event. A festival requires both proper financial and human resources (partially to do with my own time - more on this later), and rather than to hold a lackluster event, we've determined holding the festival in 2008 will give us more time to properly ramp up the fest. This said, we're working quite a bit in the background to lock in the 2008 date and venue. Stay tuned to here and the AMAS site for future info once it's solid (soon!).

With this in mind, I want to push having people submit their works to the Machinima Europe Festival 07! This event, which is the European equivalent of the festival we have in North America, will be a weekend long Machinima-focused event, complete with its own competition. Any Machinima work previously created can be submitted (regardless of which Machinima festivals you might have submitted to previously - including the AMAS ones in the States). In addition, the entry of your work is free! The submission deadline is Sept. 1st, so get crackin' and submit your Machinima work to this year's only Machinima event!