he educational game LetterSchool reached a milestone this week: just a few months after its release, more than 100,000 copies of the app have been sold. That’s a striking result for an app that teaches something generations of children have wrestled with: how to write letters and numbers. LetterSchool’s greatest achievement is that it creates a very stimulating learning environment, offering kids a truly compelling gaming experience. Boreaal Publishers believes the app is an important part of the solution for better handwriting education.
New Learning Lab Will Research, Develop Games to Engage Students, Measure Learning
A new learning lab will research and develop compelling video games that engage students in innovative ways and provide data on students comprehension of the core skills deemed critical by states for college and the 21st century workplace. Announced today at the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Games, Learning and Assessment Lab GLASS Lab, is a project of the Institute of Play, a non-profit video game, learning and research organization, with support from MacArthur, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Electronic Arts, and the Entertainment Software Association.
UW-Madison partnership creates educational game development tools
Studies highlight the benefits of playing educational video games, but a new partnership seeks to understand whether the act of designing video games boosts students’ computational thinking and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills.
Collaborating with Microsoft and the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Foundation, education researchers at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have created the curriculum and tools to make the video game design program Microsoft Kodu — a computer language that lets children create and program their own games — more accessible in K-12 classrooms.
Called Studio K, the instructional toolkit makes it easier to teach students how to design video games and assess whether the activity affects their abilities to solve problems with computers.
Read more: UW-Madison partnership creates educational game development tools (June 13, 2012).
