Here is an analysis of the interest in the educational use of computer game programming by country using Clustrmaps http://clustrmaps.com
| total | Australia | UK&Ireland | USA |
Pop million |
| 20 | 60 | 283 |
http://www.mindtools.tased.edu.au/gamemaker/default.htm | 8780 | 3070 | 550 | 6640 |
hits/million pop |
|
| 9 | 23 |
http://www.freewebs.com/schoolgamemaker/ | 887 | 765 | 55 | 575 |
hits/million pop |
|
| 0.9 | 2.0 |
http://www.gamelearning.net/ | 2955 | 270 | 550 | 1405 |
hits/million pop |
| 13.5 |
| 5.0 |
It is obvious that you cannot use a site's map to gauge relative interest in a topic in its host country, there's a strong "home town" effect. It is interesting that the 2 Australian sites both found that interest per capita was twice as high in USA as UK. Then, based on one site, Australian interest per capita was almost 3 times as high as USA.
Another analysis can be done with http://www.google.com/trends . Note that statistics for search terms are normalised on a % of searches basis. If a city rates highly its not because it has more searches of that term but that term is more likely to be used in its total of searches.
Search gamemaker:
1. | Brisbane Australia | |
|
2. | Amsterdam Netherlands | |
|
3. | Adelaide Australia | |
|
4. | Perth Australia | |
|
5. | Auckland New Zealand | |
|
6. | Melbourne Australia | |
|
7. | Stockholm Sweden | |
|
8. | Sydney Australia | |
|
9. | Helsinki Finland | |
|
10. | Seattle, WA USA |
Note that Estonia wins on a per country basis and Australia comes third (I dont understand)
Australian cities, notably Brisbane win on Constructivism, Metacognition and Pedagogy. Interestingly if you search instruction or instructional, USA fills all 10 top places but for instructional design, India wins.
I also had fun with war/peace, love/hate etc. Its also fun to look at time trends
Labels: constructivism, games, google, instruction, metacognition