…pursuing the art and science of designing educational games for use in school, after school, at home and on the go…
Most people would agree that a good game can help students learn. But what, exactly, makes a game good, and a verifiable instrument of learning?
With their vast popularity and singular ability to engage young people, digital games have been hailed as a new paradigm for education in the 21st century. But researchers know surprisingly little about how successful games work. What are the key design elements that make certain games compelling, playable, and fun? What makes a videogame a verifiable instrument of learning? How do game genres differ in their educationally effectiveness for specific topics and for specific learners than others? How do kids, both boys and girls, learn when they play games? Does the setting (classroom vs. casual) matter? Can games bridge formal and informal learning? How can games, like its precursor television, be used to prepare future learning, introduce new material, or strengthen and expand existing knowledge? How are games designed to best facilitate the transfer of learning to the realities of students’ everyday lives? And how can we use the results of our research, all of this knowledge, to guide future game design?
The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) seeks to answer these and other critical questions, pointing the way to a new era of game use in education. The Institute was established in 2008 with a prestigious grant from Microsoft Research, and supplemental funding from the Motorola Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Based at NYU, New York University, the Institute brings together game designers, computer scientists, and education researchers from 9 partner institutions, including Columbia, CUNY, the City University of New York, Dartmouth, NYU, NYU-Poly, Parsons, Chile’s Pontifica Universidad Catholica, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Teacher’s College. The active participation of globally acknowledged digital pioneers on the G4LI Advisory Board—including Alan Kay, Jaron Lanier, Mitch Resnick, and Will Wright—both reflects and strengthens the Institute’s pursuit of innovation, excellence, and best practices.
G4LI researchers apply a scientifically rigorous approach that uses both approaches to quantitative and qualitative research methods. Researchers develop new approaches to studying existing games, identify key design elements and learning patterns, develop prototype “mini games” based on these elements and patterns, test them in classroom and informal learning settings, and evaluate the results. G4LI’s initial focus is on digital games as tools for teaching science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM subjects, at the critical middle-school level.
The Institute is developing pilot programs and game play testing in collaboration with key educational constituencies within NY state in the five boroughs of Manhattan as well as suburban and rural areas of Rochester and Albany-Troy. G4LI is also partnering with a broad base of organizations to conduct ongoing research, and with a variety of constituencies that will use G4LI games as part of their educational programming and assessment strategies.
Research sites include dozens for middle-schoolers within NYC’s Department of Education, the largest school system in the United States. Additional pilot studies are being conducted with nationally recognized after-school and summer programs, such as those organized by the Mouse Squad, Computers for Youth, Classroom Inc. and Global Kids. With additional research in languages other than English and with pilots planned in cultures outside the Americas, G4LI hopes to test its findings through international partnerships. Partners in India, Turkey, South America, Hong Kong, and the United Arab Emirates are being discussed.
Organizations that would like to use G4LI games as part of their educational programming include the School of One, created by the NYC Department of Education, and named by Time Magazine one of the top 50 inventions in 2009, which aims to provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction customized to individualized academic needs and learning styles, using a broad range of teaching modalities. In addition to the School of One, Florida Virtual, the largest online public school is also a recent research partner.
The Institute shares the mission of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), a coalition of more than 200 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits. G4LI is a proud member of NCWIT’s Academic and K-12 Alliances and hosted the NCWIT National Convention at NYU in May 2011. G4LI was also host to the first ever Games for Leaning Day at the internationally recognized Games for Change festival in 2010 and hosted the entire festival in 2011. G4LI was also called upon to host the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded colloquium: Games for Learning: A Discussion of the Potential of Videogames to Transform the Future of Learning. G4LI Director Ken Perlin and Co-Director Jan Plass remain internationally sought after speakers on learning games and innovation.
Initially, G4LI will make its findings available through a series of scientific white papers and licenses, but the Institute also sees the need for a comprehensive website as well as a signature games for learning portal, a kind of Google of learning games, that game designers, teachers, educators, artists, and technologists can use as an expanding, dynamic resource in creating games to meet the growing needs of students, teachers, and school districts.
Long term, the Institute seeks to become an influential center of excellence for the study, design, and assessment of games for learning. Through extensive dissemination of its findings in scholarly journals and conferences, and through outreach to the gaming industry and educators, the Institute is already developing into a highly visible thought leader within academia, a generator of innovation within industry, and a champion of achievement in the classroom.
In addition to G4LI, the Games for Learning Institute, the newly established Games for Learning Enterprises, G4LE, will link G4LI academic and applied research with the commercial market. Through a series of partnerships, G4LE intends to bring tested learning game prototypes and fully executed and designed games and toys to the nascent global learning games market. Partnerships are being established with sought after individual game designers and independent and corporate game design stakeholders (1st Playable, Second Avenue, Microsoft), companies with a track record of producing titles and products for globally recognized educational publishers (Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Scholastic and McGraw Hill) and leading game publishers across a variety of globally recognized children’s brands (Nickelodeon’s Dora the Explorer, Disney’s Club Penguin, Sesame Workshop) for a variety of game systems, hand-held and mobile devices (Nintendo DS and Wii, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Kinnect, iphone apps and ipad applications).
G4LI plans to conduct future work not only through G4LEnterprises, focusing on the development of prototypes in collaboration with our preferred games design studio partners, but also through G4Linnovations, focusing on cutting edge interfaces, mechanics and designs, as well as the G4LDataCrypt, the G4LI data shop that is the repository of all research data and makes this data available to various G4LI constituencies. A public-private partnership involving a consortium of partners (academia, industry, private sector, venture capitalists and government) is being discussed as a strategy for long-term funding for the above as part of the G4LNetwork.
