Institute of Play

Team Player Spotlight: Nancy Nowacek

Dan Gould — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:27:19 +0000

Over the next two months AWSM will be talking with the team at Institute of Play to tell the story of who we are and the work that we do. This week, I spoke with Nancy Nowacek, Institute of Play’s Informal Learning and Engagement Strategist. What is informal learning? Informal learning is any learning that happens outside [...]

AWSM Weekly Links

Dan Gould — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 18:44:31 +0000

Every week we curate a selection of interesting stories we’ve noticed at the intersection of gaming, game design, learning, creativity, inovation and systems thinking. If you enjoy these links, please be sure to follow us on Twitter @instituteofplay for more. What’s the Secret Sauce to a Great Educational Game? Do children benefit more from lessons that masquerade as [...]

Team Player Spotlight: Greg Trefry

Dan Gould — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:16:59 +0000

Over the next two months AWSM will be talking with the team at Institute of Play to tell the story of who we are and the work that we do. To kick off this interview series, I chatted with Greg Trefry, our Lead Game Designer and the author of the book Casual Game Design. How did [...]

Learn for Life: Architecture for New Learning

Dan Gould — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:58:58 +0000

The Institute of Play is proud to be included in Gestalten’s book Learn for Life: New Architecture for New Learning. Our SMALLab at Play project is featured amongst a diverse collection of unique spaces designed to assist learning and inspire creativity. From the book: How well we learn is directly linked to where we learn. Because the [...]

Create, Play, Design: The 2012 Games Summit Workshop

Dan Gould — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 18:58:38 +0000

This past February, as a part of the The 2012 Games Summit, a team from the Institute of Play led a 2 day workshop at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago which explored the possibilities of using games as a strategy for learning and engagement. Participants all came from the MacArthur Foundation’s Hive [...]

Team Player Spotlight: Arana Shapiro

Bob Holling — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:00:40 +0000

As a founding member of Quest to Learn’s design team and a Co-Director School, Arana is daily gratified and humbled to find moments in her day that clearly reflect the intentions underlying the school’s design.

Boss Level: Rube Goldberg Machine

Bob Holling — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:41:33 +0000

Boss Level at Quest schools is a two-week intensive school-wide collaboration that closes out the trimester, where students work in teams to solve a difficult design challenge bringing together everything they’ve learned in all their classes. The term Boss Level is borrowed from video games, where, at the end of a level, players prove what [...]

Hackasaurus: X-Ray Goggles for the Web

Brian Waniewski — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:10:19 +0000

Atul Varma wants everyone to know how the worldwide web works. He envisions a generation of web makers: people as at home in the code language underlying the web as in the sites and social media tools that sit on its surface. This vision led Varma to spend the last year developing a neat new [...]

Embedded Assessment at Quest to Learn

Eliza Spang — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 01:10:09 +0000

Four eleven-year olds focus their attention on a game board. One girl rolls a set of dice. The boy across from her scribbles something on a sheet of paper, grins, and then exclaims,“The frequency of 7 is the highest, so far!” What? Since when do eleven-year olds discuss frequency while playing a game with such [...]

Team Player Spotlight: Rebecca Rufo-Tepper

Bob Holling — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 19:36:17 +0000

With the Institute from the start as a founding member of Quest to Learn’s design team, Rebecca hasn’t stopped pushing herself and others to continue to grow and take on new challenges. This summer, for instance, Rebecca took over the direction of Mission Lab, the Institute’s learning design studio, currently embedded at Quest to Learn. [...]