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Students learn how to make educational web games. Globaloria is sponsoring some of the events for the Digital Learning Day (posted below) and are "opening their Globaloria game design classes to parents, friends, educators, administrators, policy makers and media. Visitors will get to experience first-hand the innovative, hands-on "game design studio" that these classes engage in daily. They will see students developing original STEM learning games, collaborating with peers and their teacher, using a digital curriculum, and receiving support through an online learning network."

The University of Colorado Boulder exceeded its own researchers' expectations with its iDREAMS Scalable Game Design Summer Institute, and that success has been rewarded with a new $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. CU-Boulder researchers are tracking how video game design engages students in computational thinking and STEM simulation design.

Interesting article on the "Maker Movement" in STEM education. Really liked this last sentence, "It is our natural inclination to create as we learn and to learn as we create that is at the heart of this movement."

Where should ATT place its bets? Is engagement the key to stemming dropouts? Can VI be used to design richly affective environments that promote social efficacy (a spoon full of sugar) while succeeding at skill development and knowledge transfer (the medicine)?

Greenlight for Girls uses various 2.0 tools to engage girls in informal learning to promote girls toward STEM careers. They compliment online work with on the ground, face-to-face conferences so that the online conversation has correlation with face-to-face experiences and interactions, making the online engagement more visceral.

With a new $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade is about to design, build, and research a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.

unclear why virtual classrooms would aid disabled

This is peripherally related to motivation, but it does hint at the motivational structure of the game. Interesting that something as simple as "girls like food" resulted in one of the greatest games ever.