Liftoff! is aimed at teenagers and families who enjoy gaming, science, and tech. Our content is specifically aimed at promoting learning and conversations together and we encourage educators to allow their students access to this website.
Ads
Liftoff! survives based on donations received as well as the support of our management team’s other ventures. We do not run advertisements.
Educational content
Each month, several posts will be amended to include guiding questions aimed at fostering discussions for educators and parents. The site’s Executive Editor, Mr. Evan McIntosh, is a certified, practicing teacher, who keeps his students in mind when commissioning and editing content. If you have specific content you’d like to see–applied to history, or literature, or science–please contact us.
We make as much of our content “hi/lo” as possible. That is to say “high engagement” with “low reading ability”. We hope our short articles, with key ideas highlighted, and frequent breaks are useful for your reading needs.
To that end, our work often includes features like vocabulary boxes embedded into the article, in an attempt at fostering understanding. We commission work that is specifically tied to common themes in curriculum across North America: That’s why you’ll see topics such as the scientific method or capitalism applied to games.
As well, educational technology is a regular focus for us, and we’ll provide information about a number of these online services and physical products such as Sphero.
Accuracy of Content
We strive to be accurate in all the content that we post. Where applicable, the sources of information will be directly linked in the article; in other cases, the information will be the expert view of the author writing it, and exclusively represents the views of the author, not the site.
We actively engage in fact checking all pieces before publishing. If you see a necessary correction, please contact the email address below, and we will be happy to review it.
Fair Use / Educational Use
We publish work across a variety of formats and encourage its use in the classroom. We permit educational use of our content within a few caveats that apply only to nonprofit, noncommercial educational use.
- Please limit print handouts of our articles to no more than 250 students. Do not edit the content in any way and please include attribution, publication date, and url/direct link.
- Please do not make available PDFs or other digital downloads of our articles. We encourage you to share our articles in Google Classroom, Moodle, Sharepoint, Microsoft Teams, or related services via direct link.
- Students looking to cite our work should include GoodGamesWriting as the publisher in their citation.
To the extent you are required to demonstrate you have copyright permissions for our content, please show the requesting institution or legal authority this page, or direct their queries to the email address below.
Content advisories
Generally speaking, the content on Liftoff! is based on videogames with an E, E10+, or T rating. On the rare occasion we choose to focus on content from M rated games we will denote this with an advisory at the top of the article. Similarly, coverage of games that encourages microtransactions whose total may exceed $10 will also feature advisories.
We do not post advisories on science content. The content we publish under this banner has been deemed age appropriate by the Executive Editor though it may be controversial. Topics like organ donation fall under this category as does coverage of climate change. We do not deem any content about dinosaurs controversial: This is part of our regular coverage.
Privacy
We have attempted to carefully safeguard your student’s privacy. This site does not allow external users to register nor does it allow visitors to post comments. We do maintain separate social media accounts your teen may engage with — please refer to the Terms of Use of those services.
Additional Questions
Please write us with your questions or concerns.
ATTN: Mr. Evan McIntosh, Executive Editor
liftoffmag(at)gmail(dotcom)
