Teaching, Technology, and Learning

"Serious Games" (see http://www.seriousgames.org) have been getting some attention lately by using games and computer simulation to attack real problems like health care and public policy. Education has been addressed as well, with games like VirtualU (http://www.virtual-u.org/) to simulate an entire university.

David Gibson from Curveshift, an educational technology company, has developed an interesting simulation game called simSchool (http://www.simschool.org/). In it you have a virtual simulated classroom and need to adapt your teaching delivery mechanisms to the particular learning styles of the students. It's an interesting training tool and is based on pedagogical models of student learning.

Not related to education, but some fun tablet software I wrote several years back:

http://www.math.uaa.alaska.edu/~afkjm/tablet/fun.php

There is a tablet-based IRC client and a puzzle game.
If I ever get more time I've been thinking about ink plugins for Trillian. With two 8 month old twins and a 4 year old, there is not much spare time for side development projects nowadays.