At the core of Knowledge Nation is the belief that the right games used in the right way can make a significant contribution to improving learning.

Knowledge Nation currently has a vacant full-time position for a developer who specializes in online games for social and mobile platforms.

This is an excellent opportunity for an individual with the right skills, experience and character to be part of an organization at the forefront of its field, making games more accessible to a broader audience through the medium of education.

You will be an enthusiastic, positive, creative, problem solver with excellent oral & written communication skills, who is able to manage deadlines and work as a key part of a team while under pressure.

Primary Responsibilities:
• Develop features to support the monetization and viral spread of our unique KNeo World product; including:
• Developing a persistent player profile and customization options
• Development of dashboards and tracking of other key performance indicators for all stakeholders
• Development of community features, such as competitive and co-operative leaderboards, including the associated API required for our development partners
• Support the development of a virtual world, learning wrapper and avatar customization / upgrade system

Essential Skills and Experience:
• Good communicator and able to work comfortably within a technical and business teams
• Utilizing coding best practise, such as source control, extensive documenting of code and test-driven development
• Experience with MySQL/Mongo, PHP, Flash and Javascript (JQuery) essential
• Writes code that is SEO-compliant and supports cross-browser compatibility
• Experience developing technical architecture and APIs for other developers

Desirable Skills and Attributes:
• Experience with user testing and metrics capture, including A-B testing
• Experience working with virtual world / massively multiplayer technologies (preferably cross-platform)
• Experience with Facebook, Google and Twitter API’s and other social graphs / single sign-in providers
• Experience working with Super Rewards/Playspan and other monetization platforms / payment providers
• Adobe Flash/Air, Java (android) and objective C (iOS) app development experience
• High performance network programming (TCP/IP, UDP and HTTP)
• Familiar with Agile development and the Lean Start-up methodology

Please send resume and work samples to mseeney@knowledgenation.com and mbrown@knowledgenation.com

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What is the game about?

Harvest Dash is a fun game with the objective of raising enough cash to buy a bus to take a group of orphans on safari.

How do you play it?

You raise the cash, just as the name of the game suggests, by dashing around an orchard collecting the harvest and gaining points.

What are the educational benefits?

This is a game where spatial reasoning, budgeting and prioritising are all crucial skills. Where should you plant your fruits to make them easier to harvest? Which fruits will help you to gain the most points? What are the most effective upgrade powers to spend your points on? When is the right time to stop upgrading and focus on maximising the harvest and saving your money to buy that bus for the safari? Decisions, decisions, decisions all made under the pressure of limited time.

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This is a fun game and if you like Angry Birds then you will love Deconstructor. The best fun always involves a degree of challenge. This game is just difficult enough to ensure that you have to keep thinking and continue to adapt your strategy.  Make sure you don’t give up until you complete the game.

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Cut & Slice is great little fun game that will get you thinking about shapes, symmetry and patterns.

Your initial task is to divide a number of shapes into equally sized segments. Accuracy becomes increasingly important as you progress through the game cutting and slicing shapes as they become less symmetrical and more complex. Ultimately you will have to cut and slice shapes in the form of numbers and letters, not as easy as it sounds!

Like the best carpenter you will need to think before you cut and have a clear vision of the outcome you want to achieve from the beginning. As the game progresses you might need to do some calculations, or even make use of grid, in order to make your slices as close to equal in area as possible.

This is a game of skill and foresight where your ability to recognise patterns and make fine judgments will become highly refined. More hard fun from Kneo World.

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KNeoWORLD players will already be familiar with the popular Cargo Shipment game from our first bundle. In this this special Christmas edition you will need to be very well organised to fill the trucks before they arrive at their destination with the contents for Santa’s special home delivery service for the goblins.

Cargo Shipment is a simulation game and your task is to position warehouses in the best places along the route taken by the trucks. The walk-through mode allows you to predict the routes and then deploy your scarce resources to maximise the possibility of having a full load and earning some money. As you earn money you can invest in more warehouses and secure more time for your workforce to do more loading of cargo by slowing down the traffic.

Working your way through the 17 levels is challenging to say the least unless you can work out the pattern of the route taken by the trucks.

This is a game that requires excellent planning skills, the ability to make educated guesses on the basis of prior experience, quick thinking and the capacity for rapid adaptation in the light of a rapidly changing environment.

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Folds is a lovely little Origami paper folding game and a perfect fit for a KNeoWorld bundle.

Folds combines fun with challenge and enjoyment with learning.

If you are already familiar with Origami you will love this unique digital game as it closely follows the 17^th Century Japanese art form. If you are new to Origami then Folds offers a great introduction to one of the world’s best loved practical arts.

Your task at each level is to transform a simple square of paper into a specific shape by making a number of folds. Looks easy but wait until you try it yourself!

Folds has a well graduated start but rapidly ramps up as you attempt more elaborate shapes. A real test for your imagination and like the very best games pushes your patience to the limits.

This is a game that requires deep thinking and the ability to plan ahead several steps while maintaining a high degree of persistence in the face of considerable difficulty. As the shapes become more complex you will need to make hypotheses (‘what ifs’) about which folds will transform your square of paper into the shape you are trying to make. The undo facility allows you to attempt different strategies and learn from your mistakes without having to go back to the start. As with every great game don’t give up too easily and maintain your determination to succeed!

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Interesting video about inventing the future of learning from the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme in the UK. The links between research evidence and the benefits of educational technology to learning are too often assumed or asserted. Great to see this kind of programme being funded. Looking forward to finding out more.

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Our games focus on the areas of art and design, science, language and social skills, and numeracy with higher order skill outcomes of creativity, design, critical thinking, personal reflection, collaboration, communication, planning, resource management, problem solving, and strategy.

What skills do your games help develop and why are they important?

Our games are chosen for specific skill building content inherent within them. The player will enhance their ability to follow directions, think critically and strategically, manage their resources, complete tasks under pressure, investigate more options, work through a trial and error process, make decisions, and be creative.

Who decides if a game promotes a particular skill?

We are experts in Game Based Learning, Game Development and Publishing – we publish compelling games with measurable educational benefits. Our team consists of directors, researchers, professors, and innovative entrepreneurs in the fields of games based learning, game technology, primary/secondary/tertiary/home education, management, finance, sports training, design, psychology, multimedia development and technology, and more.

We are developers, educators, and consultants evaluating compelling games that have existing or latent educational potential. We rate and categorize the learning outcomes using a consistent framework and provide an educational wrapper to assess the learner over time, in order to provide demonstrable value to both the child and their parents. Our core belief is that the right games used in the right way can make a significant contribution to improving learning.

What is a bundle?

A bundle is a set of games that cover one or more skills areas. If there is a specific skill set the player wants to work on, then a bundle of games in that specific category (art & design, science, numeracy, language & social) should be purchased.

What do I get for my money?

You get some great games! Fun games that can enhance higher order skills like creativity, design, critical thinking, personal reflection, collaboration, communication, planning, resource management, problem solving, and strategy. You also get a personal tracking system to monitor progress in each of the four main categories (art & design, science, numeracy, language & social).

What does a KNeoPACK do?

We tap students’ strengths to bridge skill gaps and encourage learners to push their own boundaries through the use of multi-dimensional games.

How do I know if my child is learning something important from your games?
Our proprietary tracking system monitors your child’s progress and provides a clear dashboard to present progress in each of the four main categories over time (art & design, science, numeracy, language & social).

There are also many studies that have proven the power of games for learning. You can read some articles on our Twitter account or you can watch the student’s strengths grow right in front of your eyes by letting them play.

The post Frequently Asked Questions appeared first on KNeo World.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

It sounds like a very modern critique of our current education system but is attributed to the ancient Greek biographer and historian Plutarch (46-120 AD).

Too many of our current education models are focused on ‘delivering’ content to children as if their minds were nothing more than containers. We still value factual recall (important as this may be) far too highly at a time in human history where access to information is easier than ever before and critical thinking is urgently required if we are make sense of our increasingly complex world.

One of the great attractions of game based learning, at its very best, is that it enables learning beyond  the delivery of content towards a more engaging, interesting and motivating experience for the learner.  An experience that is much more about kindling the fire, that is the mind, than filling it as if it were an empty vessel.

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This delightful video demonstrates the ultra-high quality of Ludwig the latest game available through the KNeoWorld website.

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