From the Games For Change website:

The 2013 Games for Change Award nominees represent an extremely unique mix of games—from a game with no graphics at all to another that incorporates biofeedback from the player—on platforms from mobile to Facebook.

Whether crowd-funded via Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or supported by government grants (from Vienna, Austria or the U.S. Department of Education), finalists reflect the increasing diversity of forms, audiences, and subject matter embraced by independent developers making games for change.

Our panel of judges nominated eight games across three categories: Most Innovative, Most Significant Impact, and Best Gameplay.

Quandary previously received the award for “Most Meaningful Game” at Meaningful Play 2012. You can play the game free at quandarygame.org.

(via Games For Change)

“Albert Einstein once said that play is the highest form of research, yet many students seem to experience less play as they grow older. That’s true even as videogames are earning more respect as learning tools; and as some educators buck the trend and encourage students to learn through play.

That said, there can be real obstacles to training teachers how to use games in the classroom, or proving the marketability of learning games to commercial companies. Teachers work with restricted class times, limited access to computers, and antiquated academic standards. And in the games industry, the rise and fall of learning games has made some companies wary of the enormous investment that new games require.”

Read the full post here.

(Photo credit: Vancouver Film School)

The report, “Games for a Digital Age: K-12 Market Map and Investment Analysis,” was written by Dr. John Richards, Leslie Stebbins and Dr. Kurt Moellering, all of Consulting Services for Education, Inc. Through 50 interviews with industry leaders, researchers and policy makers, they were able to describe the current school marketplace for games as well as places for industry to invest in digital learning.

The authors explained why the educational market must be approached differently than the commercial games industry. On the industry side, a few big players have a hold over the education market, such as the big three textbook producers: Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As educators embrace digital technology, such as interactive whiteboards over blackboards and tablets over textbooks, the council theorizes there is room for new industry players.

The authors of the report also traced the flow of money in education, which unlike purchasing in the consumer sphere. Public schools receive $513 billion in funding every year, but local and state money is often tied up with salaries and other less flexible allocations. Only eight percent of the funding is federal money, but it includes grants for technology and other innovations. The authors advise game design companies to work with school districts to write grants and to keep grants in mind when designing games.

The report distills the types of games that are ready for investment into two categories: short-form games that can fit in a classroom period of less than forty minutes and long-form games that must be spread out over several class periods. Short-form games, they suggest, should allow for teacher flexibility and provide assessment and feedback that allows for personal learning environments (PLEs). Long-form games are more immersive and are more likely to teach 21st century skills of problem solving or analytic thinking. There has also been more research done on long-form games, which can satisfy educators’ demands for proof of effectiveness, though the authors suggest that short-form games can be bundled into sellable collections that would appeal to teachers trying to give their students a variety of games across subject matters.

Additional developments, such as the movement to one-to-one technology and bring your own devices (BYOD), have made the field of educational gaming in the classroom more likely for investment, according to the paper’s authors. They cite that the Internet infrastructure in classrooms has improved and the government has recently emphasized STEM skills and PLEs for students, all of which support a market for learning games.

Although the authors cite that there are few models for investors to follow, there has been increased funding for educational technology companies that mimics the previous peak of the 1990s. As digital media become more pervasive in students’ lives, they believe digital games offer a robust market for expansion as well as improvement for pedagogy.

Download the full report here.

We invited teachers, educational researchers, and edtech specialists to our studio in Cambridge last Friday to preview Playful Learning, the free online platform we’ve been developing over the past few months (details here). With Playful Learning, we’re aiming to create a dynamic, playful online environment that will let teachers…

1. Discover good games for teaching a certain subject or concept

2. Access, configure, and remix what we’re calling “implementations” around these games (case studies of using them in a classroom)

3. Share and discuss their experiences with the rest of the community

…all this, while keeping in mind issues of curriculum, assessment, costs, training, time, and efficacy. We wanted to know, what stops teachers from using games in the classroom? And from our end, how can we make it easier for them?

The group debating the use of games.

From Drill and Kill to Playful Learning

Many of our participants reminded us of the reality of classroom constraints that teachers face, particularly the obstacles of class preparation, technical limitations, and short class times. Compounded by concerns that popular games may not address curriculum standards and that it would be difficult to prove their usefulness to administrators and parents, the group hadn’t seen games used too widely across the curriculum. What they had seen used in schools tended to leaned more toward “drill and kill” games in the style of Math Blaster — which, despite their insistent popularity, may not offer the play, exploration, and reflection we understand to be intrinsic to meaningful learning.

Still, cartoony interactive worksheets set in space are a baby step toward a broader movement of playful learning.

Considering metadata around games.

The Best Time to Learn is…?

We wanted to know what it would take to get teachers interested in a site like Playful Learning and in classroom gaming in general. We learned that many still had fond memories of games in the ‘90s like Oregon Trail, Sim City, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Despite the games’ commercial roots, teachers built resources around them to some success. But with games today like Civilization V being such complex behemoths to learn — let alone to teach — many expressed their frustration with figuring out how to adapt them.

Surely, this would be the moment where the Playful Learning platform could swoop in and offer support. So we asked them what the breaking point would be, and this is what they told us: the times that they were most likely to explore games would be either when they receive new technology for their classroom or when they find the class is unresponsive to a topic.

With these touchpoints in mind, we broke up into pairs and embarked on an activity to prioritize and brainstorm metadata around games in order of its relevance to a teacher. This metadata ranged from simple under-the-hood facts like supported platforms to more subjective considerations like a snapshot of students’ impressions of the game. Soon the participants found themselves visualizing their own interfaces, grouping bits of information in various corners of the tables they were working on.

Designing an interface!

Next Steps

It’s back to the drawing board, as we take the important lessons from our helpful feedback team and integrate them into the next phase of designing the nitty-gritty of Playful Learning. We’ve been able to identify and correct assumptions about teachers’ and students’ needs, as continue our collaborations with teachers to draw out the problems of finding games to use in the classroom. It goes to show how invaluable continued usability testing sessions, discussion groups, and survey research can be in the iterative process of building an open educational resource like Playful Learning.

We’d like to thank our participants once again for their insights, as well as take the time to invite any interested readers to sign up for updates on our Playful Learning platform!

— Adam Mandeville and Michael Suen

Eric writes about how we can build strong teams for creating learning games:

Games, particularly educational games, are a massively multidisciplinary endeavor. They can’t be effectively approached without the abovementioned skills (among others). But it turns out that they also can’t be effectively approached by simply checking off a name for each of these responsibilities. That is a surefire way to create an educational game that is, in the words of my former colleague Henry Jenkins, “about as educational as a bad game and as much fun as a bad lecture”.

Read the full post here.