New Lab Aims to Create, Study Educational Games
By Ian Sherr
A new videogame design lab is coming to Silicon Valley, but its goals are different from the studios that cook up the next “Battlefield” war simulation shooter or “World of Warcraft” multiplayer fantasy game. This one is focused on helping students learn.
Electronic Arts is going to be home for a new project called the Games, Learning and Assessment, or GLASS, Lab. The effort is funded in large part by $10.3 million in grants from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The project will have two primary goals: building next-generation educational games, and creating tools to take existing games, potentially such as EA’s upcoming “SimCity,” and measure what students learn from them.
Imagine a child playing the popular city-building game, and they’re presented with a problem: the ocean’s become too polluted, and they need to fix it. The student can begin fiddling with different things, such as how many trash collectors there are.
“This is why we think games are a great environment for education, they’re basically digital models,” said Katie Salen, executive director at the Institute of Play, which will be running the lab. The not-for-profit design studio works to connect games and education, and helps to run two children’s schools in the U.S.
Instead of throwing facts at students, and testing them on what they learn, Ms. Salen said simulation games like SimCity plop kids into complex problems with many smaller issues to tackle, forcing them to use skills such as mathematics and science interchangeably.
GLASS Lab is naturally not the first attempt at making games educational. Decades ago, games like “The Oregon Trail,” “Math Blaster” and “Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?” helped to educate an entire generation of kids, not to mention also teaching them how to use a computer.
But, Ms. Salen said that while those games were fun at first, kids quickly grew tired of them.
Meanwhile, more traditional games have become far more advanced, with built-in software that watches what the player is doing and sends that information back to a central computer. That information is then analyzed to help game makers make better games.
Reworking that software, and some mechanics of the game, could hold the key to making games that much more educational, Ms. Salen said.
“We don’t want it to be an add-on where you’re playing this cool game, and then you have to do this thing that feels like homework,” she added. “We want it to be something that helps you play the game.”
The project, besides the MacArthur and Gates foundations, is receiving smaller in-kind donations from EA and the Entertainment Software Association.
GLASS Lab, whose budget is small compared to the multi-million dollar cost of making a top-rated game title, will focus its efforts on applying educational techniques to existing games, such as EA’s upcoming “SimCity” or Valve’s “Portal” physics-based puzzle game. GLASS may also develop games for mobile devices.
Connie Yowell, the MacArthur Foundation’s director of education, said what attracted her to the effort was the speed at which games can give feedback on what a student learns. Usually, she said, students learn something, they take standardized tests a couple times a year, and then they get results back half a year later. Games, by comparison, give feedback immediately.
“It’s a foray for us into breaking open what we hope is the entire conversation over what learning and assessment can look like,” she said.
Mike Gallagher, head of the Entertainment Software Association, said educational games, done right, could not only help to grow the industry but also spur hiring of educators within the entertainment industry.
“When education experts make videogames, they’re not called fun, they’re called homework. So, why not have educators and videogame experts work together?” he said. “If it works, it’ll take off.”
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