Florida Virtual School - Conspiracy Code. AT&T makes largest-ever investment in video games-based education. AT&T makes largest ever investment into new video game-based learning program Telecom company AT&T will invest $3.8 million into a video games-based education program, the largest donation ever made by the company. The program, developed by nonprofit startup company GameDesk, aims to test whether gaming can aid at-risk students by motivating them to stay in school, raise test scores and enjoy learning.
"We decided we were going to aim for exponential change in education," stated Beth Shiroshi, AT&T Foundation's vice president for sustainability & philanthropy. GameDesk will use the donation to build a "classroom of the future" in Los Angeles where their game-related curriculum can be monitored and evaluated. The company is known for similar games-oriented programs like Math Maker which combines basic game development with high school-level math concepts, and is said to increase math scores in 80 percent of its users. Learn by gaming: John Riccitiello @ TEDxCMU. What2Learn. What Do Wii Remotes Have to Do With Science? Ask Sixth-Graders.
With the marble roller coaster, students used the Wii remotes to test their theories on speed. They designed the roller coaster, then used the infrared camera in front of the Wii remote to see where in the structure the marbles would role by the fastest. The same idea was used to test the speed of the balloon-powered cars. During the course of the classes, the Stanford researchers have been surprised by students' reactions: The students were more interested in the designing phase than by the measuring phase. "Students had a hard time letting go of the engineering," Ju said. "They wanted to keep redesigning things. The moments of talking about measuring stuff was interrupted by trying to find ways of redesigning and changing things. " This tension between science and engineering is one of the ideas being explored through the eyes of sixth-graders.
The Nueva kids are lucky. That's not the best way of teaching science and scientific inquiry, he said. Games for Science Learning and Scientific Discovery. Even though more people are recognizing the potential for teaching and learning through video games, there are still plenty of skeptics -- those who see video games as a mindless distraction, as entertainment and not education. But the work of a research center at the University of Washington may be at the forefront of challenging that notion. And this isn't just about how students can benefit from educational gaming either; it's about how scientific discovery can benefit from gamers. That latter element has found UW's Center for Game Science in the news a lot lately, as one of the games it developed has helped lead to a breakthrough in AIDS research.
Creative Research Outsourcing The game in question is called Fold.it, an online protein-folding game. Fold.it asks players to work with proteins' 3D structures (in other words, how the proteins "fold"). Since the game's release, some 100,000 people have played Foldit, most of whom have little or no background in biochemistry. Solve Puzzles for Science | Foldit.