Gimmickry, or How Exergaming Went Mainstream
August 25, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

I've been thinking about exercise games lately, primarily due to an onslaught of new games, devices, and initiatives. For example, we've got Footgaming, a sort of promotional blog for a student fitness program called Generation Fit. The group hopes to support casual and educational play with a peripheral called FootPOWR. Judy Shasek, the program's proponent, argues that physical activity contributes to both fitness and academic success. Then there's Wii Sqweeze (pictured at top right), from Interaction Laboratories. The device promises isometric upper body exercise via shoulder abduction and adduction, wrought via a two-handled pumping interface with attached wiimote. There's reason ...

Suffering under Global Poverty
August 6, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Ack. Check out the Race Against Global Poverty Game. According to its sponsors, the game is supposed give "children living in the UK the chance to learn about the developing world in a fun and stimulating way." I wonder what went wrong here. It's a graphically lush simulated board game with cute, carefully crafted horse-type creatures as tokens, but the game is just trivia, and there's no sound, and its neither fun nor stimulating, but rather insipid. ...

Lockdown: A School Shooting Game
July 17, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Lockdown is a "serious game for incident responses to school shootings." The game was created at the GamePipe Lab at USC Engineering with sponsorship from Sandia National Laboratories. The game looks very polished, but I couldn't help but notice that Lockdown's apparent approach to "incident response" is: "do whatever you'd do in a First-Person Shooter. Oh yeah, and tell people to exit calmly." Watch the video on the page linked above to witness the myriad firearms available to the player's SWAT character, as well as his alarmingly comical, Counter-Strike style final firefight with the perpetrator. (via Liz Losh) ...

Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008 Finals
June 26, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Microsoft holds an annual student competition called Imagine Cup, with its theme chosen from the UN Millennium Goals. The 2008 theme is the environment, and for the first time there is a special game development, with games created in XNA Game Studio Express. I'll be in Paris next week acting as a judge for the 2008 finals. There are six finalist teams, although I'm not yet sure what their games are about. The top three US finalists appear after the jump. ...

Spore among "Best Games For the Classroom"
June 10, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

College@Home has published a list of their pics for the 25 Best Sims and Games For the Classroom. The focus is mostly devoted to commercial games of probably interest to kids, which could also feasibly be used in a classroom setting. The list is almost all comprised good games, for once, so it's actually a better resource than the all-too-familiar article title would lead you to believe. One thing I found particularly interesting was the inclusion of Spore on the list, with this description: "an incredibly powerful tool in the classroom for teaching students about evolution and the behavior of ...

Budget Hero
May 18, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Budget Hero is the new serious game about balancing the federal budget, from American Public Media. I've been out of commission recently, so instead of writing my own thoughts on Budget Hero I want to encourage you to read a thorough review by Georgia Tech Digital Media Ph.D. student Ben Medler. Budget Hero is not the first budget game, but it makes a number of improvements over previous efforts, making the experience of budget choices more deliberate and less arbitrary. The main complaint one could offer is the same one that someone mounted against The Redistricting Game at the GDC ...

Liz Losh on the NASA MMO Fail
May 9, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Recently I made some strong remarks about NASA's decision to pull (or "reconfigure") the funding plan for their long-planned educational MMO. Virtualpolitik tracker Liz Losh has since authored a far more sophisticated analysis of the situation. Go read the whole thing, but in brief Losh attributes three main factors to NASA's decision: profound hierarchy, assumptions about volunteerism, and a sense of strong branding. ...

I am a Gorilla
April 28, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Clark Boyd interviewed me the other day for a piece on BBC's The World radio program which covered a mobile game supporting gorilla conservation. The game, called Silverback, is a cute, involved J2ME title in the platformer-adventure game genre. It turns out the game was actually created back in 2003 by Kiwanja, and this is a re-release for the benefit of Fauna & Flora International. You can download the game free over-the-air, although A £5 donation is requested. Unlike so many advocacy games, Silverback is actually pretty good! The player takes the role of a young gorilla facing challenges from ...

NASA MMO Update: Brains Pulled, not Funding
April 23, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Earlier this week I reported that NASA had pulled the $3m worth of funding previously committed to an educational MMO project. Other reliable sources ran the same story (1, 2, 3). Sean Hollister wrote a new story on the topic, including some interview material from Daniel Laughlin, one of the NASA project managers and recent WCG commenter. Here's the gist of Hollister's piece: Yes, NASA lost the $3m, but they have another $2m. But, they're not going to spend that on game development. Instead they're going to spend it on "education experts" and NASA insiders The non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement ...

NASA MMO Budget Cut from $3m to $0
April 21, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

(Updated here, 23 April) A while back, NASA started talking about a large-scale, well-funded MMO they wanted to make for educational purposes. The organization published a Request for Information (RFI) that claimed "A high quality synthetic gaming environment is a vital element of Nasa's educational cyberstructure." The goals of the project were to "foster career exploration opportunities in a much deeper way than reading alone would permit and at a fraction of the time and cost of an internship program." The reported budget for the project was a respectable $3 million. Today, the Second Life Herald reports comes news that ...

The UN Shoots an Air Ball
April 14, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

The UN Foundation's Nothing But Nets campaign provides low-cost bed nets in an effort to reduce malaria-related deaths in Africa in particular. As a part of the campaign, they have created a game, Deliver the Net. If you play the game and sign up at the end, the organization will deliver a net to Africa on their behalf. The sentiment is a respectable one. But the game misses the net entirely. The player drives a motorbike in a desolate African setting, stopping at local huts to deliver nets and jumping over occasional obstacles. At the end of the game, the ...

Knowledge is Nothing. Tenure is Everything.
March 21, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Thanks to David Wessman on the IGDA Education SIG mailing list for pointing out Survival of the Witless, a card game about the academic tenure process. The title above was the game's tagline. It’s a brutal game, where the most common card is "ass-kissing" (to simulate the most common action in academia). Three to eight players try to collect enough writing cards and a contract to finish their book, and enough influence with committee members to win a tenure decision. In addition to Ass Kissing, other cards you could play in the game included Seduction, Bold New Theory, Student Boycott, ...

GDC 2008: Out of the Box, EA Fuels New Ideas with Madden and Sims Titles
February 18, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Presentation by Rob Moore, Steve Seabolt (EA) at the Serious Games Summit, Game Developers Conference 2008. Moore got stuck in bad weather but sent along some materials about A number of EA Sports titles are used by athletes, including by NASCAR drivers to get used to tracks, by pro basketball and football players to memorize. These were just unexpected uses of the ordinary commercial versions of games. More recently, sports training professionals have become interested in using versions of these games for their purposes. One such company went to EA with this idea. The result is Madden Play Action Simulator, ...

Audience Response System for games in schools
January 28, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

The New York Times published an article today about using audience response systems -- those handheld devices used to poll gameshow audiences -- for classroom games. One school district in southern California spent half a million bucks on them, and others have followed suit. In a typical system, the clickers record data from individuals, and transmit that information, through wireless technology, to a computer program. The program can instantly display the results, tally them and present them in elaborate spreadsheets and eye-catching graphics like spaceships or “Jeopardy!”-style boards. It can track the percentage of correct answers received for each question ...

Scholastic Defiles Self, World with Game-Book Tie-ins
December 19, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Scholastic, the textbook publisher Kaiser Permanente paid off to publish their craptastic nutrition game, is back with more cross-media garbage for you and your tween. Now that the Harry Potter series is complete, Scholastic is eager to get a new franchise out. According to a story in the New York Times today, the series, called The 39 Clues will feature 10 books, apparently to be penned by different authors including Gordon Korman and Rick Riordan. But in addition, as the Times reports "many children are now as transfixed by Internet and video games as they are by reading." According to ...

Science Museum Physics Games
November 6, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Remember playing The Incredible Machine? It was one of the only good educational games of the early 90s -- maybe all of the 90s. The UK Science Museum has created a set of online games to support their Launchpad installation of physics topics. The games, dubbed Launchball, play like a more abstract version of The Incredible Machine. You use electricity, wind, magnetism, circuits, and other paraphernalia to lead a ball from start to goal. The production value is very high, although it did take me a while to figure out that I had to mouseover the different colored blocks to ...

Library Games at CMU
October 14, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

The Carnegie Mellon University Libraries have a couple of library games (yes, i said library games) in their new Library Arcade . The first game is Within Range, and it's an LC call number shelving game. Seriously. The second game is I'll Get It, and it's more complex. The player takes the role of a librarian servicing visitor requests. You have to decide what kind of resources are appropriate for each one. It's basically Library Dash. Within Range is cute but a bit forgettable (LC shelving isn't exactly rocket science, and there's not a lot of game wrapped around the ...

Hungarian Freedom Fighters Graphic Novel
October 11, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Lauer Learning has announced a new version of their Freedom Fighter '56 game, a bundle that includes a graphic novel based on the game's story. It's a nice idea, and the production value looks very high. We should see more combined products like this in serious games, games with additional media supporting them. ...

Alternate Reality Games Seminar
September 24, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Despite their interesting features, Alternate Reality Games like The Beast and ilovebees really got their start as marketing campaigns. Since World Without Oil, there has been growing interest in using ARGs for serious purposes. Game community Unfiction is sponsoring a one-day event, Embrace the Chaos, to help people understand how to use these games. The cost is $175 before Sept 30 and $200 thereafter. I think it's a bit unfortunate that the organizers have positioned the event toward marketers ("Alternate Reality Games and online experience marketing when done correctly create a powerful connection between the audience and you"), but I ...

An Instructional Alternate Reality Game
September 1, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Exceptional Software Strategies and Media Edge offer Never Rest Game, a new counter-terrorism ARG in which players must "thwart terrorism by using their own methods against them when they least expect it." The unusual thing about this ARG is that it bills itself as explicitly educational, and even tries to coin a new term for such a subgenre: the Instructional Alternate Reality Game, or I-ARG: An I-ARG applies adult learning theory to the ARG format, creating a flexible framework in which learning is delivered through story and gameplay. With engaging storylines controlled by the instructor, I-ARGs deliver immersive ‘stealth’ learning, ...

World of Borecraft
June 26, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Slate just published an article by Justin Peters about games that teach, cleverly titled World of Borecraft. It's a thoughtful article that basically calls the whole concept of educational games out on the carpet, from Mavis Beacon through Serious Games. Persuasive Games' work is called out along with the others, subject to a number of fair criticisms that Peters summarizes as, "In taking the fun out of video games, companies like Persuasive make them less alluring to people who love games and more alluring to people who don't." We get to bear the dubious label of antihero among this motley ...

Art does not take exit surveys
April 16, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I should be frank: I'm actually a bit tired of hearing about Super Columbine Massacre RPG. That's not because I don't support the game -- I was one of its earliest supporters, and I remain impressed and intrigued by the way the game attempts to put the player in the disturbing shoes of Harris and Klebold. Rather, I'm tired of seeing conversations sparked by SCMRPG that only advance theories about games in general, instead of making actual critiques of this particular game itself. The latest volley is from Will Interactive CEO Sharon Sloane, who recently wrote an opinion piece about ...

Advertising and Ecology: Planet Green Game
April 10, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Starbucks Coffee and Global Green USA have created Planet Green Game, a game about energy conservation and consumption. The game is set in a hypothetical town called Evergreen. The player chooses a character and transportation mode (foot, skateboard, bicycle, and three types of automobiles, each with different emissions). A variety of energy-related minigames are scattered throughout the town -- a MPG management driving game at the service station, a click-to-fix energy waste game at home, a build a city park game, a quiz at the school and city hall, and energy-efficient shopping memory game at the building supply store. ...

Stop Disasters Game
March 26, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

PlayerThree, creators of Food Force among other great titles, have a new game sponsored by the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction. The game is appropriately called Stop Disasters!, and it's a fantastic, simple, rich little strategy game. It's also a rich game, covering five disaster scenarios in great detail. The current scenarios include tsunami, wild fire, flood, hurricane, and earthquake; more may be added over time. In the game, the player must accomplish a series of infrastructure and safety subtasks as they prepare for a pending disaster. The implementation is solid, but I really wish I could have ...

Serious Games book for Japan
February 27, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Toru Fujimoto let me know that his new book Serious Games: Transforming Education and Society Through Digital Games has just been published by Tokyo Denki University Press. If you don't know Toru already, he's the source for serious games related material in Japan. So it's not surprising that he wrote the book on it! Here's a (bad) Babelfish translation of the book webpage (my favorite mistranslationism is "Dull fool is dyeing"). The book is in Japanese and written for the Japanese market, but Toru also knows everything about what's going on in serious games in Japan. ...

Seymour Papert in a coma after traffic accident
December 20, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Seymour Papert, constructionist learning pioneer and inventor of the Logo programming language is in a coma after being struck by a motorcycle in Hanoi, Vietnam. The Boston Globe has a more detailed story. I'm not sure why I haven't seen broader coverage of this story, but I hadn't seen it before. (via Cindy) ...

Preview Bogost's New Book, Persuasive Games
December 11, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

My new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, which will be published in spring 2007, now has an official page up at the MIT Press site. This is the major research project I've been working on for the last couple years, and I'm really excited about getting it out there. The main argument in the book is that videogames exemplify a new form of rhetoric, which I call procedural rhetoric. Then I look at a multitude of examples, from early arcade games to very contemporary games. The book is very readable and should appeal to researchers, developers, and ...

BASIC games on the web
November 22, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

One of the things we're often grousing about in the computing education and games education communities is programming literacy (some people call this procedural literacy, but I reserve that phrase for a more general concept of literacy, more on this another time). Raph Koster points us to Quite Basic, a new tool that offers a lightweight, easily accessible programming environment right inside a web page. And even better, it's the BASIC that we once booted and loved. Quite features a text and canvas output space, a happy text area for typing your code, and a little mini debugger. Slick stuff. ...

Freedom Fighter 56
October 26, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Lauer Learning has announced the availability of Freedom Fighter 56, an interactive graphic novel and game about the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. From the description: Learn through this immersive story as it literally drops you into the streets of Budapest to struggle alongside the heroic characters that fought for Hungary’s freedom, despite the overwhelming odds. Immersed in authentic imagery and actual experiences, players are challenged to make strategic decisions, wrestle with moral dilemmas and gather historically accurate inventory items to use in persuasion scenarios throughout the game The graphic art looks great and I know some very smart people who worked ...

Iran releases state-funded oil disruption game
September 30, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

According to the NY Times, the Iranian government has funded a videogame that illustrates how to disrupt world oil supplies by blowing up a U.S. tanker in strait of Hormuz. This recalls Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's warning that oil exports might be put in jeopardy if the U.S. doesn't back off Iran's nuclear program. The game, called "Counter Strike" (no relation to the Half-Life conversion) was produced by eight people in three months. I had a hard time categorizing this entry. Is this a newsgame? Is it an educational game? Is propagandist, or is it perhaps the first example of a ...

Contest for Yourth Work Games
September 6, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Computer Space 2006 announces a contest for online and mobile games created for youth work. From the announcement: The aim of the proposed games should be to provide modern training tools and examples for youth trainers and organizers of youth events and to provocative exploration of important topics in the youth work like human rights, intercultural learning, youth project management etc. All the produced games will be distributed for free in the youth centers and youth organizations We're a bit late coming to this, so you'll have to act quickly; the deadline is 20 September. ...

Native Dancer - Virtual Powwows for Health
August 28, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Here's a rare example of an game that simultaneously attempts to educate, preserve an at-risk culture, improve health, and tackle an interesting game design problem. The Native Dancer Diabetes Education Game is a project in development at North Dakota State University and supported by the White Earth Reservation Tribal Council. ...

Mobile game teaches emergency first aid
July 14, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Spanish developer Exelweiss has created Emergency 112 (or Emergency 911, if you prefer, in English), a mobile game to teach first aid techniques for medical emergencies. The game was apparently created for emergency response company Area de Intervención, but it looks like it's generally available too; a demo is available from the Area de Intervención site. Screenshots and game footage are also available from the developer. The player takes the role of a good samaritan who finds pedestrians in trouble. You must check the victim's condition and choose an appropriate diagnosis and treatment. ...

Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, but train it for what?
June 16, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Author's note: Nintendo has created a community at Gather.com to facilitate discussion of their "Touch Generations" series of games. I have cross-posted this article there, and readers may want to view the other articles in that series. I know the game isn't new, but we never covered it properly here, and I'm rather glad we waited so we can benefit from a bit of perspective on the unusual yet popular title for Nintendo DS. Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day was released in mid April by Nintendo as the first salvo in the company's new battle to ...

Review of Cyber-Budget, the French Budget Game
June 12, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I mentioned the French Cyber Budget game a week or so ago, but I couldn't find the actual game until Mark Nelson sent me the link this week. You can play Cyber-Budget online, but keep in mind that it's in French only, and pretty language-heavy. Budgets are comprised of multiple allocations in conflict. They are abstract--numbers on balance sheets--but their effects are concrete. It's hard to personalize them and create empathy around them. This game is an interesting attempt to make budgeting playable. The main strategy is to contextualize the budgeting process in the material world through a map interface ...

SimSchool, a classroom simulator
March 17, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Now available, SimSchool, a "classroom simulation for educators." The game is free to play online. SimSchool puts the player in control of a classroom. The player is challenged to teach the entire class, while taking into account each student's specific learning style and behavioral quirks. I played a prerelease version and it's an interesting attempt to simulate classroom management. The player has to look up each student on a computer to get insights into their past performance and to plan how to address that particular student accordingly. Difficulty increases by adding more students. And the students have some fairly amusing ...

Food Force on Wired
February 15, 2006 - by Gonzalo Frasca

It's been a while since Food Force has been launched but people are still talking about it. Now it's the turn of Wired to discuss the game. I must say that when I first saw the description of the article on the news aggregator "Food Force[...] tops the game download charts on Yahoo -- despite being more "edu" than "tainment." I was annoyed by the "edu" versus "tainment" remark. But actually it looks like the phrase was written by some editor and not the journalist, who did a great job with the article. FYI, as a former journalist, I tend ...

All Things Africa
February 8, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

A few bits of Africa-related videogame news to report. First, you can now play and vote for the four finalists in the MTV crisis in Darfur student game design contest, which we mentioned last year. The contest asked student teams to design a videogame to build awareness about genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The network is offering a $50,000 prize to develop the game, although the students don't get to develop it, but rather a professional agency. The students will be invited to New York to advise and participate. Anyway, you can play the finalist games and vote at www.darfurisdying.com. The ...

LeapFrog Leapster Update: L-Max and Third Party Development
February 6, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I've been pretty hard on LeapFrog and their Leapster handheld "learning game system." During its and our first year, 2003, I wrote a review of the Leapster, which I followed up a year later. LeapFrog was a major sponsor of Henry Jenkins's first Education Arcade conference, which I covered here as well (1, 2). Back then (mid-2004), they were promoting the "Games for Learning Seal," a kind of validation mark for educational games, which I actively scorned (and which has since been abandoned). And I've been nothing short of incensed at LeapFrog's continued lack of third party development support (1, ...

Divorce, videogame-style
February 1, 2006 - by Gonzalo Frasca

"Earthquake in Zipland" is a PC game for children with divorced parents. It's an adventure game, where the main character is torn between the King and Queen of the island, which split apart after an earthquake. The game will be out soon but meanwhile you can download a demo and watch a Windows Media video that gives you an overview of the project. The game is developed in Israel but all the texts and voiceovers are in English. When I was a kid, there was a collection of Spanish books on "complex" topics for children (where do babies come from, ...

Volvo Drive for Life
November 14, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

The NY Times reports that Volvo and Microsoft have collaborated on a game for Xbox called Volvo Drive for Life, "a showcase for the Volvo nameplate, three Volvo models and the longtime Volvo brand identity as the car designed with safety foremost." Clearly, this won't be a Burnout clone -- players drive on a proving grounds course with and without safety features in the Volvo S40 S60R, and XC90. The player can then drive the car in three real-world courses, Pacific Coast Highway, the Italian Grand Prix, and the road to the ice hotel in Jukkasjarvi. Real-world is relative, I ...

The Fight for Energy
August 29, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Energien.dk is a Danish educational site for junior high kids, specifically about electricity, gas and energy. It was created for use in Danish schools, and appears to have been commissioned by for an association of Danish energy companies and providers.   If you click on the link Kampen om Energien (the Fight for Energy) on that page, you'll find is an RTS style game in which the player manages the use and distribution of electricity during the last 150 years. The player must "build a society" to realize "the challenges faced with when it starts to use electricity, when it ...

Farming, Gender, Narcotics, and other related things
August 2, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Last week Natsume released new versions of Harvest Moon: Harvest Moon: Another Wonderful Life for GameCube and Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town for GBA. I hesitate to say that I'm a "big fan" of Harvest Moon, but like Animal Crossing it's a game that charms and allures me, both as a player and as a designer. The 3d Playstation and Gamecube varieties felt too complicated, but I've played an embarrassing number of hours of Harvest Moon on GBA, and I've still yet to convince someone to marry my sullen, zucchini-planting avatar. I do still carry my chickens around ...

Islam games, Christian games, ...
July 28, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

We recently reported on the 4th Christian Game Developers Conference, happening this week in Portland. On a related and unrelated note, I recently came upon this op-ed (thanks to Andrew), by NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman cites a WCJ report that the Iqra Learning Center, a site investigated after the 7/7 London bombings was the sole UK distributor of Islamgames, "a U.S.-based company that makes video games [featuring] apocalyptic battles between defenders of Islam and opponents." The op-ed cites Ummah Defense I, in which "the world is 'finally united under the Banner of Islam' in 2114, until a revolt ...

Urine: The Game
July 5, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

We went to the Grossology exhibit at the local museum this weekend (The Fernbank here in Atlanta). The latest trend in museums seems to be these traveling exhibits. I guess its a way for museums to bank on past visit figures from other venues without spending their own money on exhibition development. It feels a little McMuseum to me, but sometimes the exhibits are good. Anyway, Grossology is all about "The (Impolite) Science of the Human Body," even though the science is pretty thin; it's more like a little tiny theme park or playground. Exhibits included Up Your Nose, a ...

Japanese Finance Games
June 15, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

Thanks to Serious Games Japan maven Toru Fujimoto for tipping us off to My Dream and Bank, a Japanese Flash-based advergame intended to teach high school students about the basics of finance and starting a business. The game was produced by the Japanese Bankers Association, and according to Toru 100,000 copies were distributed on CD-ROM to schools and home users, free of charge. From what I can tell about the game, the player can choose one of four characters, each of which has a different personality and business goal -- internet entrepreneur, hair salon owner, coffee shop owner, and fashion ...

Public School FPS
June 6, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

We talk a lot about educational games here. Education and games often raises questions about violence in games, such as the one Richard Bartle posed recently over at Terra Nova "On the one hand, we're saying that no no no, games don't teach people all those bad things, but on the other hand we're saying that yes yes yes, games do teach people all these good things. Can we really sustain both these positions?" For my thoughts on this matter, I'd refer you to my response last year to the Critical Simulation section of Noah and Pat's First Person. A ...

Power Politics free for Educators
June 3, 2005 - by Ian Bogost

WCG regular Randy Chase has just announced that his prexy election sim Power Politics III (on WCG: 1, 2) is now free for use in the classroom. The new version will also have likely '08 candidates. Click through for t