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Founded in 2004, Games for Change facilitates the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts. Unlike the commercial gaming industry, we aim to leverage entertainment and engagement for social good. To further grow the field, Games for Change convenes multiple stakeholders, highlights best practices, incubates games, and helps create and direct investment into new projects.

This is a Slashdot article that points to a research paper (unfinished) that analyzes which elements are most important in the success/failure of a game. The abstract and conclusion sections of the article are succinct and accessible. The results are quite telling. One wonders if the results are consistent across game genres/audiences/distribution methods.

Tying into discussions this week about bringing access to mobile devices to all via non-prohibitive costs, while still reaching a set of bare-minmum technical specs for actual use: India's "$35 tablet" has been a pipedream in the tech blog-o-sphere for awhile now, but it's finally available (though for a price of roughly $60). Still though, as an actual Android color touch tablet, with WiFi and cellular data capability - I'm curious to see how it's received and if it's adopted in any sort of large scale

I had heard months ago that India was creating this, but was not going to offer it commercially - rather, just for its own country. Just like the Little Professor (Prof Dede) calculator, when tablets get this affordable, educational systems can afford classroom sets of them and then use them regularly. But to Prof Dede's point - can they do everything that more expensive tablets can do? Or better yet - do they HAVE to?

I think this is what they're aiming to do - all classrooms/students across the country having this particular tablet. They won't be able to do everything today's expensive tablets can do, but I think they'll still be able too to do plenty. This $35 tablet's specs are comparable to the mobile devices we had here in the US in 2008/2009. Even back then, we were able to web browse, check email, use social networking (sharing pics and video too), watching streaming online video, and play basic 2D games. But even beyond those basic features, I think this tablet will be able to do more than we expect from something at this price point and basic hardware, for 2 reasons: 1. Wide-spread adoption of a single hardware. If this thing truly does become THE tablet for India's students, it will have such a massive userbase that software developers and designers who create educational software will have to cater to it. They will have to study this tablet and learn the ins-and-outs of its hardware in order to deliver content for it. "Underpowered" hardware is able to deliver experiences well beyond what would normally be expected from it when developers are able to optimize heavily for that particular set of components. This is why software for Apple's iPhone and iPad, and games for video game consoles (xbox, PS3, wii) are so polished. For the consoles especially, all the users have the same exact hardware, with the same features and components. Developers are able to create software that is very specialized for that hardware- opposed to spending their resources and time making sure the software works on a wide variety of hardware (like in the PC world). With this development style in mind, and with a fixed hardware model remaining widely used in the market for many years- the resultant software is very polished and goes beyond what users expect from it. This is why today's game consoles, which have been around since 2005/6, produce visuals that are still really impressive and sta

If only educational games were engaging enough for students to want to pay to play...

This site lists educational games by category. There is no feed for updates (at least, I haven't found one) and games listed vary greatly in quality and educational merit. The site is hard to navigate due to poor design and doesn't seem to update very frequently

Cool Site! What an easy way to see what has been explored and was in the works. It seemed as though Health and Language acquisition were big topics.

Getting excited about Sesame Street&AR idea that was posted earlier, went to find if Lego is doing anything as Lego Education is getting more active lately to my understanding.  I only found this. This to me is not AR although it is utilizing some level of digital technology (social network/sharing work with others).  I would be more interested to see more work from traditional game/toy players to be aggressive in the tech space. 

The spirit behind the use of these games is great. You might have seen, heard, and played these games before but the authors call for the use of these games to be simple and concise for the teachers and students is timely in the wake of very complex games that some teachers might want to force into the curriculum.

Interesting examples of how some games are used for more than just entertainment including crowdsourcing for scientific progress, helping support research, and bridging the language gap.

Hi Adrian, thanks for sharing this. I think that the crowdsourcing potential for online games is great for solving real-life problems. Maybe educators could actually use such a platform for engaging students in school too, like crowdsourcing to solve problems in school.

This is not the first talk given by Dr. McGonigal and since I've watched both now, I can tell you that this one is really worth watching! This transformative power of gaming is relevant to education and she is an embodiment of its revolutionary power.

Thank you for sharing this Drew I agree that this is worth watching. Who would have thought that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals in treating clinical anxiety and depression?

Great post about the ways that books and video games are actually quite similar. My favorites: "1. Books are a powerful technology. They can lead to aggression and violence (witness the Bible, the Koran, and the Turner Diaries in the wrong hands). Nazi Germany was a highly literate society. Games, so far, do not have this much power, but some day they may. 4. Books can make you stupid by not questioning what they say. 8. Just giving people books does not make them smarter; it all depends on what they do with them and who they do it with. For young people, it depends, too, on how much and how well they get mentored. Mentoring is, in fact, crucial."

Thanks for tagging this- definitely thought provoking. I might argue that both books and games can, in fact, make people 'smarter' in and of themselves, but that both are far better when used socially with mentor support and quality teaching.

Educational Arcade paper from MIT focusing on: "the background and affordances of Simulations, Digital Games, and Social Networking, the cognitive implications of these technologies, specific challenges with using these tools in the classroom, as well as strategies for overcoming these challenges in order to achieve successful learning experiences, and the future of these technologies and their impact and learning and teaching."

Interesting article - highlights the growth of virtual training tools and their capacity to improve real world tasks. Example: "The amazing results of the training and simulation program have led to significantly improved grades on students' critical skills tests, taking scores from a 56% success in 2007, to 95% at the end of 2008 after the simulation was instituted."

'Quest to Learn' is a New York City public middle and high school, supporting collaborative student-led learning: "Quest to Learn has used research in game-based learning to create a rigorous and engaging collaborative learning space where students feel safe taking risks and using their successes and failures to create and apply new knowledge." "Nurturing social and emotional learning (SEL) and 21st century skills like inventiveness, risk taking and collaboration."

Hi Ellen, I think this is an interesting topic. You may be interested in Piskorski's work at HBS. Professor Piskorski's current research examines why and how people use on-line social networks, both in the US and abroad. Using extensive fieldwork and large scale empirical analyses, he constructed theories of social failures and networks as covers which allow us to understand numerous facets of people's on-line behaviors. http://drfd.hbs.edu/fit/public/facultyInfo.do?facInfo=ovr&facId=10663

This article discusses the future of gaming and how companies are approaching gaming as platforms develop and evolve. "You have different visions of the future. Some companies think it's primarily browser-based and mobile is kind of an afterthought. Then you have other companies that are more in the social/mobile space and they say mobile is the future. From my point of view, I think Funzio has placed the bet correctly in that they are focusing on a cross-platform approach."

Developers will need to be even more cross-platform after the news today: Adobe has announced they are ending development of the mobile versions of their Flash browser-plugin. They will instead be focusing their resources on tools for developing content for HTML5 (cross-browser compatibility for both computers and mobile devices, no plugins required), or for deploying content as apps designed to be deployed for all the major devices' app stores. http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/11/09/8717108-adobe-gives-up-on-mobile-flash-focuses-on-open-web-standards

Adults these days (especially those who love themselves some Dateline) seem really into chastising video games those crazy kids are into as symptomatic of the human race's inevitable, steady decline. Like every hobby and medium, legitimate concerns regarding these technologies certainly exist, but their complete lack of validity is decidedly not amongst them.

This is a suite of free online learning games to introduce middle to early high school-age youth to a variety of STEM-based professions -- recently was released at a launch event from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Similar to MIT's Scratch, Globaloria positions itself as helping students develop STEM knowledge, digital literacy skills, and college readiness through game design. The program markets itself as a blended learning model.

Global Conflicts" is an award-winning educational game series used for teaching citizenship, geography, and media courses

Excellent article on Video game model as a learning tool. Useful takeaways for motivation.