Creativity counts

The name of the game is certainly creativity when it comes to the festival’s games competition. Returning this year will be a Dragons’ Den- style panel to judge the primary and secondary school finalists. Games had to take the form of an adventure platform or puzzle game with a story behind it, and the player had to be able to control a character and solve a puzzle or collect items to progress to the next level and ultimately complete the game. Art and design, technology, literacy and numeracy could all be embraced. Prizes include a tour of the studio at game developers Denki. Wednesday 4.30pm at the Education Showcase area in the Education Village.

Movers and takers

There’s fun and games of a different sort at the game-based learning area on Learning and Teaching Scotland’s stand. If you’re weary from sitting all day in lectures and seminars, you can go and shake it all out with Just Dance, a Nintendo Wii game which allows you to “groove yourself silly” - and then there’s Dance on Broadway.

If that’s not daring enough, you can play the role of a photo-journalist on Wild Earth: African Safari, and drive the safari jeep to take pictures of 30 different wild animals in the Serengeti National Park - but don’t get too close to the animals or the Wii remote will begin to rumble, making the picture much harder to take. Speaking of remotes, LTS staff will be demonstrating how pupils can build a controller pad to control a computer game that pupils can build too.

Learning and Teaching Scotland, stand H40.