Three Years of „Finding of the week“

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the three years anniversary of my „Finding of the week“ series.

On March 23rd 2013, I published my first „Finding of the week“ article. Since this historic date, I managed to write one blog entry per week for this special section of my research blog. By now, I have written 157 articles mostly related to computer games and their special training functions that help us players to improve our skills and become better at various tasks. Despite the strong focus on computer games, I also addressed various other topics such as historic spaceflight events and environmental issues.

Moreover, celebrating the three years anniversary makes me realize how important and varied the gamification of learning has become. Although I have discussed many use cases of computer games for training purposses, I still discover new fields of application or interesting side effects of playing computer games and hence, the series has even become an inventory of computer games and their respective training functions.

Additionally, the series also demonstrates the importance of my research objective as, despite the infinite amount of possibilities, there is no clear model that explains the actual process of encoding a certain knowledge in a computer game in order to develop a well tailored training application.

However, the series has also become a reminder of the importance of enviromental protection. More and more we start to feel the effects of a man-made global warming and, if we do not act now, we will ruin the only planet we have. Nature does not need us, but we need the nature. We should do everything we could in order to protect our home and save it for future generation.

Finally, I am really impressed by the amount of new things I have learned and experienced during the last three years. So many great things happened during this time and I am curious to find out what new things I will discover during the next three years!