On the first day of the upcoming 11th
Annual Games For Change
Festival, to be held in New York from April 22-24 and 26, Games, Learning, and Assessment Lab (GlassLab)
leaders will take the stage to share the Lab’s unique collaboration model to
accelerate the research, development and distribution of high-quality Educational
Serious Games, in the talk Collaborating
for Change.
One of GlassLab’s most recent collaborators
is NASA.
GlassLab
will take this opportunity to officially announce and launch the Lab’s second "Serious
Game", as a much-anticipated follow up to SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! released in November 2013: a tablet game created in
collaboration with NASA.
According to the Fast Company website, the new "Serious
Game" with the working title Heroes is set on a Mars colony, and tests students'
mastery of the elements of argumentation, including claims, evidence and
reasoning. GlassLab would also be in final talks with a few other big
game development companies to adapt the assessment infrastructure to more
big-name games as well.
The nonprofit GlassLab brings together
leaders in commercial games and experts in learning and assessment to leverage
digital games as powerful formative assessment environments.
GlassLab aspires
to create a new collaboration model between commercial game studios and
learning organizations. It represents a groundbreaking collaboration between
the nonprofit Institute of Play,
the Entertainment Software
Association, EA (Electronic Arts), and
learning experts from Educational Testing Service
and Pearson’s Center for Digital Data,
Analytics & Adaptive Learning, among others. It was established in 2012
with $10.3 M in grants from the John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
SimCityEDU: Pollution Challenge! is GlassLab’s first Educational Serious
Game built on the popular Electronic Arts‘ SimCity video game platform. It is a learning and assessment tool for middle school students covering the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards.
With its realistic simulations of energy use and
pollution, SimCityEDU goes beyond creating a context for learning. It was
designed to gather evidence about students' systems thinking - creators want to
use game-based assessments like these to promote the shift from traditional tests
that are optimized for gauging memorized content knowledge, to start measuring how
well people can think.