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SUBMIT:
- Questions
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Does Digital Game-Based Learning work over
the Internet and intranets?
Yes, absolutely. Many types of Digital Game-Based Learning work
over the Internet or an intranet with no additional requirements
beyond an e-mail account and/or a reasonably up-to-date browser.
These include the a variety of question-based and task-based templates
from games2train.com.
As in the consumer games world, however, there is a limit to the
amount of data that can comfortably be sent over the network without
degrading either the performance of the game, or in the case of
business, the performance of other applications. While businesses
often have fast connections and "fat pipes," these "pipes"
are usually full of important, often mission-critical data, and
IT does not look favorably on large amounts of learning game data
clogging them up.
What this means is that until speed and bandwidth increase dramatically
(and they will) running a state-of-the-art graphics intensive game
entirely over the Internet or a corporate intranet is not possible.
The standard solution in the consumer games world is to keep all
the large files (mainly graphics) that are often reused on the user's
"local" computer, either on the hard drive, CD- ROM or a combination
of the two. The information that is sent over the web is limited
to positional and status changes which can be described with very
small amounts of data, making economical use of bandwidth and speeding
up play.
An issue in many corporations is that CD-ROMS or large downloads
to the hard disk are looked upon with disfavor from a resource management
and control perspective. Thus an important part of the process of
creating and integrating any Digital Game-Based Learning in a company
is working closely with IT representatives to ensure that their
standards are respected and met, or if exceptions are needed, that
those exceptions get granted. Not bringing in IT people in time
is the key mistake in the Digital Game-Based Learning implementation
process. "In time" usually means at the very beginning.
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