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This is a webinar chat that I sat in on today (A few questions I posed are featured in the Q&A at the end.) With the new SimCity release, they have also partnered with a company called GlassLab that has designed a teacher resource hub and also modified game that enables teachers to easily use the game in classrooms. There will be specific inquiry based challenges that allow students to interact in the game environment to investigate community issues (ranging from water shortages, power outages, labor disputes, earthquakes, budget concerns, etc.) and work with citizens and government to solve the issues. There is also an exciting multiplayer format where neighboring cities are controlled by other students and they must work together to solve problems. Glass Lab is partnering with EA Games, Gates Foundation, and ETS to build the teacher hub where educators can design and share best practices, lesson plans, etc. In addition, they will be doing a long term study to measure educational outcomes. It appears as though they are using this game as a pilot opportunity to build the framework for larger commercial game integration into the classroom.

Massively Multiplayer online game were gamers create federations, alliances, etc. and the world is directly influenced by these large corporations and groups that are entirely player driven. Here, as in MAG, social interaction is not an ancillary element but critical to gameplay.

Interesting article about how certain features of video games (gaining experience points, forming guilds, etc.) are being incorporated in unexpected ways in our lives.

Virtual Education Oasis... humm? Where do you think we will be in 2044? Author Ernest Cline, is interviewed about his novel Ready Player One, where "schools are built like palaces on the violence-free planet Ludus, and students take daytrips through both the Louvre and the human heart. These are but some of the benefits offered by the OASIS, a massive, multiplayer online game where most people in 2044 choose to spend their existence, away from the troubles of the real world. The OASIS combines the scope of a galaxy with the immersion of the Matrix; it is a near-perfect virtual reality."

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.

This article discusses play in virtual worlds (focusing on World of Warcraft) with an emphasis both on the learning that takes place and the engagement. You'll have to log in with your Harvard ID to get the article, FYI. "Our observation showed that players are motivated by the game's scope, rules, and scenario to create and participate in virtual communities, and share their knowledge with others, while newcomers are encouraged to engage in collective actions, and develop their skill base. We also found that although current MMORPGs have not been designed as instructional tools, they provide an excellent fantasy environment for intrinsically motivating learning, where players can experience the elements of challenge, curiosity, and control [30]." "People engage in pervasive games that use the best of two worlds, the virtual and the physical, in order to offer to its players the sense of maximum enjoyment."