In cooperation with the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, GameBrix announces the opening of the Sigma Xi Water Contest to all GameBrix subscribers. Participants may use any tool to create a Flash game, and are encouraged to take advantage of the GameBrix Builder and Animator products.

Sigma Xi has made 2008 the Year of Water, promoting focus on what it considers to be one of the most important issues in science today. GameBrix supports this focus with a game contest leading into the Sigma Xi Annual Meeting of Nov. 22-23, 2008. GameBrix will deliver a workshop on casual game design at this meeting.

The contest will run from Oct. 7 through Nov. 15, 2008, with the winning game announced on Nov. 21. Game submissions will be judged on quality, fun and adherence to the theme of water conservation, estuaries and water usage at home. Winners will receive a one year full membership to GameBrix. In addition, the winning game will be featured on gamebrix.com through Dec. 31, 2008.

The RoboTech Center for casual game design announced today that it has trained over 1,000 new game designers on the GameBrix game building platform. Since 2007, RoboTech Center instructors have taught game design courses at Rivier College and Daniel Webster College in Nashua, NH, and at the Museum of Science, Boston and the DeCordova Museum in the greater Boston area. These courses have prepared youth, under 18 years old, with foundational career skills in Flash game design and animation.

The RoboTech Center was founded in 2003 by Nanu and Naveena Swamy with the purpose of engaging youth in the subjects of casual game design, animation and robotics. Since then, RoboTech Center instructors have trained over 2,000 young people in workshops, camps and after-school programs. From this experience, Nanu and Naveena Swamy have written a book on game design called “Collaborative Online Game Creation” that will be available in late Fall 2008.

Today, RoboTech Center game design courses center around the GameBrix game design platform, the first online system for design, assembly and compilation of original Flash games. With the GameBrix platform, game designers use graphical tools to assemble ready made game objects into finished game designs. The platform then compiles the game designs into Flash executables (.swf files) that run in any Flash-enabled web browser.

Casual games are a $2.25 billion industry, according to the Casual Games Association, involving over 200 million game players worldwide. They are characterized by short, simple game play that appeals to a general audience, men and women, young and old. Most casual games are delivered as Adobe Flash executables, which can be played in 96% of the world’s one billion personal computers, and 500 million mobile phones around the world.