MIT's Team Gets Bigger and Better

"The great thing about having a larger team," says Scot Osterweil of the Education Arcade, "is that we've got that many more interesting points of view." And with the beginning of the new school year, Scot's team has indeed added some great new points of view.

Recent graduate Ravi Purushotma, first-year graduate student Evan Wendel and undergraduate Clara Rhee are now a part of the Education Arcade’s LG2G team, joining graduate students Kristina Drzaic and Dan Roy, who have been working with Scot since last spring.

Prior to joining the Education Arcade, Ravi Purushotma became interested in learning games through his own experience of using "The Sims 2" to learn German. In fact, he even made a video about the process. Ravi's currently working with the Education Arcade to explore some design options for LG2G, specifically around the geometry part of the curriculum. And he's also exploring the different technologies that may be used when LG2G actually goes mobile in the classroom and beyond. "I'm doing a lot of thinking," he says, "about how all the pieces are ultimately going to fit together."

Clara Rhee is a sophomore at MIT and has joined the Education Arcade as part of the school’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities program. A student in the Comparative Media Studies program (like the other members of the team), Clara was specifically brought on-board to revamp the Education Arcade website. Her goal, she says, is "to bring the playful spirit of the [LG2G] project" to the site.

Evan Wendel spent last year working at Xerox debugging printer software. Now in his first year at MIT, Evan is helping to develop some of the puzzles for LG2G, and he likes it a whole lot better than his previous gig: "It's so cool to be able to tell your friends, who are in med school or law school… they're like 'what you doing?' [I get to tell them] 'I'm working on educational game design.' It has a nice ring to it.”

We think so, too.

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