GameDesk

By Andrew Miller

GameDesk, an organization that’s developing a variety of game-based learning initiatives, is venturing into new terrain with the opening of a new school and the development of new digital tools, with millions of dollars in funding from both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AT&T.

The PlayMaker School, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will open in Los Angeles on September 7, with 60 students in 6th grade, and will operate as a “school within a school” at New Roads, an independent middle school.

Like Quest to Learn, the game-based school in New York, PlayMaker will incorporate principles of game-based learning into the entire instructional model, but with an additional focus on making and discovering. The goal is to engage students in both high-tech and low-tech games and modular, instructional activities. Individual students will work with an “Adventure Map” that will guide them to choose their own path, allowing for students to control how they learn and when they learn it. These modules will be not only individual tasks, but will also include group work. In a unit on kinetic and potential energy, for example, students will watch videos, play games, create digital roller-coasters, and create real-life models.

With ongoing formative assessments tied not only to the Common Core, but also practical digital skills, collaboration, critical thinking, and social emotion learning principles, the focus is meant to go beyond traditional schooling goals. Instruction will focus on providing context for the content, whereby students understand the relevance of what they’re learning. Teachers will play the roles of questioners, facilitators, and reflective agents.

More information will soon be released about the specifics of the program.

SCALING UP

Lucien Vattel, the executive director of GameDesk, said he wants to scale the company’s tools and learning models to schools and other groups across the country. To that end, the company received $3.8 million from AT&T to fund two new initiatives: a learning laboratory called Learning Center, which will include a “classroom of the future” where new digital tools will be developed, tested, evaluated, and aligned with academic standards; and free access to an online portal of digital learning content, as well as support for teachers to learn how to integrate it.

“We see this as being a clearing house for all the best work in this space and we want the entire education community to contribute content to the site, from the professional developer, to the educator in Kansas, to the creative and tenacious parents and kids at home,” Vattel said.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

As part of the professional development for the PlayMaker School, GameDesk also initiated a collaborative called DreamLab focused on not only creating many of the GameDesk’s projects, but also how to implement and sustain them. Instead of simply creating and implementing, however, they design in collaboration with student and teachers, to ensure that real needs are being met well.

Although still in its infancy as a component of GameDesk’s work, DreamLab hopes to provide professional development for teachers on site. In addition, they hope to build a portal where teachers can collaborate on lesson design and share their ideas for implementing the games in the classroom. In the past months as they prepared for the new school opening, new teachers received intensive professional development, learned to design games, played games, and understood the pedagogical principles around using games for learning.

GAMES IN STEM

GameDesk is also creating and collaborating on games that target the Common Core standards. Mathmaker, which GameDesk created, is focused on having students take on the roles of engineers to learn math concepts. This game, as well as others, is directed at amplifying STEM curriculum, and is being piloting and used in large urban high schools.

GameDesk also uses another math-focused game called Motion Math In-Class, created by the team at Stanford University Learning, Design and Technology Program, which is part of its math curriculum. This interactive iPad app helps students learn fractions, proportions and percentages.

Another unique game is Dojo, which uses play and biometrics to work on emotion regulation (not to be confused with Class Dojo, which helps teachers with classroom management). So far, it has been used successfully with diverse populations and even youth within or exiting the juvenile justice system. Players experience real-life challenges that test their emotions, but also gives them strategies and feedback on how to overcome these challenges.

More to come, as GameDesk continues to grow.

Ifanyi Bell has been a classroom teacher and a filmmaker, and currently develops and produces educational media for web-based, digital asset repositories at KQED.

I was 13 years old in high school when this ad came out. As a young man, I was captivated by this optimistic depiction of a world where we could pay tolls without stopping, and tuck my future child in from a phonebooth with a view screen (what’s a phone booth?).

America is a land of dreamers. Look back at the literary history of American fiction and you’ll see elements of an imaginary world that have found their way into reality in the novels of Ray Bradbury and Aldus Huxley. Technology companies have also predictably provided us a vision of a future where the world is made better by the technology they will hypothetically deliver to us.

AT&T actually did pretty well with their predictions — in all but one area. Yes, we have Skype and video chat, turn-by-turn navigation, go-to-meeting virtual conferences, TV on demand, E.Z.-pass and Fast-Track and iPads.

But where has reality not quite lived up to the ad’s vision? The K-12 school setting: classrooms where, based on this ad, there should by now be well-established remote, real-time interactive learning environments and a primary school child interacting with another halfway around the world in real-time from a view screen integrated into  her desk. Yes, those technologies are available, and they do occur sporadically here and there, but they are by far the exception.

In 2008, Cisco Systems launched a similar campaign to the AT&T spots. This time, though, the company has chosen education as a vehicle to drive its products, depicting scenes where classrooms across the globe are used as an example of how their line of never-mentioned “telepresence” hardware and software tools can be used. Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2_md8I5UnI&NR=1

Recently, Cisco introduced something called “The Learning Society.” Sounds promising — I look forward to finding out more about this.