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The purpose of this paper is to explore and emphasize the impact of academic computer game studies programs on library services and collections.

A review of the literature related to the relationship between gamers, game studies, and libraries, precedes discussion of the background of academic computer game studies programs. The potential challenges and opportunities concerning collection development, information literacy instruction, and reference within academic libraries are addressed along with highlights of emerging best practices.

The paper provides analysis of game studies as an emerging academic discipline and of the scholarly communication within this field. It also highlights emerging practices within academic librarians serving students and faculty in this field.

Because game studies is a new discipline, best practices to meet users' needs are just beginning to be established for academic libraries. Further research is needed in the area of information‐seeking behavior, perception of game studies' students and faculty, and their information literacy skills.

This is an opportunity for librarians who serve students and faculty in game studies to learn about the history of this discipline and what several academic librarians are currently doing to meet their needs in collection development, information literacy instruction, and reference services.

While discussing the history of game studies as an academic program, the paper also highlights the issues related to library services and collections for the emerging academic discipline of game studies in an effort to support academic librarians who work with game studies students and faculty.

Interactive learning seeks to leverage ideas and techniques from entertainment games to enhance its own quality. The challenge posed by a video game is that it can be a complex dynamic of technologies, craft, and art shaped into a coherent and engaging whole. The relationship between the participant and his virtual world is an intelligent one – varying through the twists and turns of the interactive narrative. The artificial intelligence used by a game is the glue that binds the game elements to a complete user experience. Understanding how it is used in this brave new world of immersive, interactive, education is necessary if we are to understand its capabilities and limitations.

Sport sponsorship—seemingly well established—is coming under sharp attack. Yet sponsorship remains a flourishing sub‐industry, and sponsors are fighting off accusations that they are not playing the game. Chris Phillips

Computer‐based games can now be tailored to fit individual applications with relative ease. The “soft” format of games packages (as opposed to the “hard” format of manual games) allows them to be customised and kept up‐to‐date. Wholetrain, developed by the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology and MAKRO, fills the training gap within the wholesale industry, aimed at junior wholesale managers and supervisors and providing (simulated) training in a Cash and Carry environment where experimentation is not usually feasible.

As maker-centered learning grows rapidly in school environments, there is an urgent need for new forms of assessment. The purpose of this paper is to report on the development and implementation of tools to support embedded assessment of maker competencies within school-based maker programs and describes alternative assessment approaches to rubrics and portfolios.

This study used a design-based research (DBR) method, with researchers collaborating with US middle school teachers to iteratively design a set of tools that support implementation of embedded assessment. Based on teacher and student interviews, classroom observations, journal notes and post-implementation interviews, the authors report on the final phase of DBR, highlighting how teachers can implement embedded assessment in maker classrooms as well as the challenges that teachers face with assessment.

This study showed that embedded assessment can be implemented in a variety of ways, and that flexible and adaptable assessment tools can play a crucial role in supporting teachers in this process. Additionally, though teachers expressed a strong desire for student involvement in the assessment process, we observed minimal student agency during implementation. Further study is needed to investigate how establishing classroom culture and norms around assessment may enable students to fully participate in assessment processes.

Due to the dynamic and collaborative nature of maker-centered learning, teachers may find it difficult to provide on-the-fly feedback. By employing an embedded assessment approach, this study explored a new form of assessment that is flexible and adaptable, allowing teachers to formally plan ahead while also adjusting in the moment.

The purpose of this paper is to provide, at a particularly significant point in its short history, an overview of a unique system of performance management to which all principal local authorities in England have been subject for the past three years.

Comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) is the controversial centrepiece of a system of performance measurement and improvement management that has involved the external classification of each individual local authority as Excellent, Good, Fair, Weak or Poor. It is a system that, as comparative data on the scale of local government demonstrate, could only be attempted in the UK. The article is written as a non‐technical and evaluative narrative of the introduction, early operation and impact of this system, concluding with the changes in methodology introduced to counter the phenomenon of too many of the nation's local authorities becoming officially too good for the existing measurement framework.

Key points that the article brings out concern the exceptional circumstances of UK local government that make such a performance management system even contemplatable, the improvement and recovery part of the regime, and the inherent implications of a system geared to providing regular statistical evidence of continuous performance improvement.

The originality lies in the CPA system itself, aspects of which at least will be of interest both to specialists in performance measurement and management and to those with an interest in decentralized government and intergovernmental relations.

An original concept for a Web‐based role play “SurfingGlobalChange” is proposed on the basis of multi‐year interdisciplinary teaching experience and constructivist pedagogy. Underlying didactic orientation is towards self‐guided learning, acquiring socially compatible “competence to act” in a globalised world, self‐optimising social procedures inside teams, process‐orientation and peer‐review instead of teacher’s review. Participating students find themselves in an argumentative battle where they put their marks at stake. A comparison with similar games highlights the increased level of responsibility attributed to and expected from learners using this kind of “digital game‐based learning”.