The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Wisconsin-Madison have joined forces to catalyze new, creative, teaching and learning innovations around the next generation of commercially available educational electronic games. The Education Arcade, a two-year-old research and educational initiative established by leading scholars of computer and video games and education at both universities, plans to focus efforts by partnering with educational publishers, media companies and game developers to produce new educational electronic games and make them available to a larger audience of students and their teachers and parents.

The Education Arcade’s mission has been to demonstrate the social, cultural, and educational potentials of videogames by initiating new game development projects, coordinating interdisciplinary research efforts and informing public conversations about the broader and sometimes unexpected uses of this emerging art form in education. Having sponsored several annual conferences with the Entertainment Software Association at its E3Expo in Los Angeles, and with a series of landmark research projects in the field now complete, the Education Arcade looks ahead to help drive new innovations with commercial partners.

Previously, researchers at MIT have explored key issues in the use of a wide variety of media in teaching and learning through the Games-to-Teach Project, a Microsoft-funded initiative with MIT Comparative Media Studies that ran between 2001 and 2003. The project resulted in a suite of conceptual frameworks designed to support learning across math, science, engineering, and humanities curricula. Working with top game designers from industry and with faculty across MIT’s five schools, researchers produced 15 game concepts with supporting pedagogy that showed how advanced math, science and humanities content could be uniquely blended with state-of-the-art game play.

Several challenges have severely limited broader development and availability of educational games in the market, including the collapse of the CD-ROM software market, the failure of educational media in retail spaces, strict state adoption requirements, expensive production costs, and limited collaboration across the variety of disciplines needed to create compelling and educationally viable interactive media. By working with leading textbook publishers, media companies and game developers, the Education Arcade aims to help overcome these formidable challenges by focusing on an initial set of strategically-targeted, educationally-proven and expertly developed and produced on-line computer games that will be distributed through desktop computers and mobile devices.

By serving as the glue between university-based research and commercial product development, the Education Arcade is uniquely poised to make a profound impact on the production and use of games in the classroom and beyond. Education Arcade contributions to game production include (1) creative contextual development, (2) pedagogical and learning framework development, (3) curricular and teacher support, and (4) assessment and student evaluation studies.

Two short videos prepared by the Online Learning department at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) showcase the center’s activities. The first video, “Online Learning Showcase” (6 minutes long), is an overview of several projects at RIT. Topics include Pachyderm, the Student Response System, RIT’s course management systems approach, remote tutoring with Breeze Meeting and blended learning courses.The second video, “A Conversation on Blended Learning” (5 minutes long), highlights the advantages of using technology to facilitate teamwork and social networking among deaf and hearing students—in this case, activities that were previously only possible with the assistance of an interpreter. The video tells the story of how technology not only allows for the interactions to happen, but enables a deaf student to take on a leadership role in the class—without an interpreter.

Both videos may be viewed at http://online.rit.edu/faculty/

The Online Learning website is located at http://online.rit.edu

The Learning Commons at the University of Calgary has worked with the Glenbow museum to create Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, an extensive, interactive website that introduces the legendary tales and colorful personalities who shaped and defined Alberta’s history, and are the predecessors of Alberta’s maverick nature.

The Learning Commons was founded in 1997 to develop and promote quality, innovative approaches to teaching and learning in higher education. The organization provides support for the academic community through professional development programs, curriculum and project support services, and multimedia and technology development.

Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta was created to connect to the grades four to seven social studies curriculum. The ideas for student activities follow a project-based and inquiry-based learning approach and are multidisciplinary, combining social studies with language arts, mathematics, science, art, and health.

The site presents nationally significant stories of the important people and events that have shaped the identity of Alberta. Over 545 primary source images, audio, and video clips of historical materials have been digitized to increase access to Glenbow’s collections and information resources on the history of Alberta. These historical primary source materials are first-hand, original, authentic accounts of the past. They are the actual records or evidence of history and allow students to become actively engaged by positioning people, places, ideas, and events within their historical context. There is also a section on historical maps and an interactive timeline.

The Mavericks online exhibition, part of Alberta Canada’s centennial celebration, was created by the Learning Commons using the Pachyderm 2.0 software tool, a program that allows users to design educational and interactive multimedia presentations. The software links screens together, resizes images to appropriate dimensions, packages up audio and video files, and incorporates Flash technology to create vibrant and informative presentations. The Learning Commons is a member of the Pachyderm 2.0 Project consortium, a collaboration of software developers, university library specialists and museum experts who are developing and testing the program. D’Arcy Norman and Shawn Tse led the Mavericks initiative on behalf of the Learning Commons. King Chung Huang also contributed to the project. Flash programming was provided by Arts ISIT at the University of British Columbia.

Research into educational gaming is leading to a deeper understanding of topics like gaming and engagement theory, the effect of using games in practice, and the structure of cooperation in gameplay. In the 2006 Horizon Report, the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative describe the movement this way:”The past year has seen a subtle shift in the way educational gaming is perceived in higher education. A number of interesting examples have shown anecdotally that games can be very effective tools for learning. As a result, there is an increasing interest among scholars in researching the subject, not only to quantify the actual effect of using games to teach, but also to define the essence of gaming itself in order to better apply its principles to education. Educational gaming is no longer a fringe activity pursued only by extreme technophiles—it is emerging as a discipline unto itself, multifaceted and rich.”

One example of this research is the Daedalus Project, an ongoing study of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) players. MMORPGs, or MMOs, are a video game genre that allow thousands of people to interact, compete, and collaborate in an online virtual environment. Over the past 6 years, more than 40,000 MMORPG players have participated in the project by completing surveys about their playing style, habits, and preferences. Various topics have been examined, from gender-related motivation factors to the effect of running an in-game guild on one’s real life experiences. The results of the research are available as reports sorted by topic.