Quest to Learn supports a uniquely vibrant learning community that brings together students, educators, game designers, curriculum specialists and parents. - See more at: http://q2l.org/about#sthash.zlTuuiwE.dpuf
This game does a great job of incorporating the social aspect of gaming. In addition, Sokikom uses classroom management techniques to reward postive behavior through "class cash." It would be interesting to look at what behaviors are actually transferred into the classroom.
This is a really good paper that shows how to evaluate tools for education with learning curves. They use adaptive tutoring systems as an example but it can be applied to just about any educational tool, such as a website, tablet app, and so on. There is some math, but it is very approachable.
Two important points that jumped up for me while watching this video: 1) Have you ever seen a baby who's not motivated to learn? 2) Imagine how motivated you'd be if you adopted a 'growth' mindset where every activity is a learning endeavor.
The author talks about society's addiction to "stupid" mini-games (e.g. Angry Birds), which have minimal learning objectives but help us compartmentalize our lives.
"Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create academically challenging, immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of "systems." Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century."
It's interesting that so many products have a teacher focused data output model but if the software isn't making recommendations, the student must wait for the teacher to analyze the data to make changes. I wonder when software will empower students to make their own curricular choices based on their data. I don't believe I've seen this.