Our Development Team

These are the people that will lead our project to develop learning games that incorporate both pre-algebra and reading skills, and support students, teachers, and families as they embark on these new kinds of learning experiences.

Over the past several years, Maryland Public Television (MPT) has continued its educational mission by creating Thinkport, a powerful supersite for Maryland’s K-12 education community. A very popular part of the site presents highly interative web experiences for students. In these online field trips, students take the lead in learning, deciding, for example, whether to stay a slave or escape to freedom or the cause of Edgar Allan Poe’s death. MPT’s professional development staff continues to help teachers integrate these and other technology-based opportunities into classrooms throughout the region. Teachers are at the core of this project. Game developers will be working with pre-algebra teachers and administrators to explore games and create games that are appropriate for today’s classroom.

MPT will provide project oversight and coordination, working to ensure that the games and supporting resources developed will be highly engaging and highly useful to all members of the educational community.

The Comparative Media Studies Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been at the epicenter of the Serious Games movement for many years. Led by Henry Jenkins, this group premiered a program called Games to Teach, which lead to the development of many educational games and the associated research that supported their usefulness in education. Games to Teach morphed into the Education Arcade, an MIT-University of Wisconsin partnership that is committed to “to research and development projects that drive innovation in educational computer and video games. [The Education Arcade’s] research-based creative design, pedagogical development, and student evaluation activities inform the production and distribution of effective new teaching and learning tools for today's classrooms and beyond.”

MIT project leader Scot Osterweil will guide a team of MIT developers and researchers in the design of the core games for this project.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Technology in Education (CTE) is pleased to begin its investigation of the pedagogical application of games and simulations. CTE has a long history studying alternative approaches to instruction, classroom management, and collaborative teaming. The result of this work, a system of instructional strategies known as “Boundless Learning,” will provide the educational basis for our study of games and simulations.

CTE’s work on this STAR SCHOOLS grant will include a particular focus on 3-D immersive environments and virtual reality (VR). The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL), leveraging many years of work developing virtual, simulated environments for the military, will partner with CTE to explore the pedagogical possibilities of VR. APL brings both substantial technical expertise in developing 3D immersive models and decades of experience implementing simulations for training purposes. CTE and APL are excited to explore how the content and environments previously developed can be repurposed and adapted for students, offering a thoroughly engaging learning experience.

Back to Got Games Home Page