Communications of the ACM
Video Game Invades Classroom, Scores Education Points
Students at Ascend School in Oakland, CA, test-play the new "SimCity" game while GlassLab staffers root them on .
Credit: Rob Fix
GlassLab is an effort by Electronic Arts to use video games to inspire students to embrace science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers.
GlassLab developers have created a free online community based on the newly redesigned world-building game SimCity, as well as free lesson plans and an online teacher's network. In the game, players act as the builder and mayor of a fictional town, building infrastructure, industry, and housing to attract residents. In the SimCityEDU lessons, users must solve specific problems that plague the fictional town.
"Being able to touch something, being able to experiment with it, I think, really can make a difference in a kid's life," says Maxis Games' Lucy Bradshaw.
SimCity's popularity has encouraged the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to spend millions of dollars researching how video games help kids learn.
GlassLab plans to work with other game developers and educational-testing experts to create new games and analyze existing ones, to determine how students learn to play them and how they can learn from them. MacArthur Foundation educational director Connie Yowell, one of GlassLab's originators, notes that video games upend existing learning models.
From USA Today
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