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.
Digital Tools Teaching Strategies WiiScience Amidst grim reports this week that California schools are “failing to invest enough time, money and training to teach science well,” and that only one out of 10 elementary school students gets to play with hands-on science experiments, a shining counter-example is happening at the Nueva School in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Hillsborough. Sixth-grade students are using Wii remote controls to collect scientific data on things like positive and negative acceleration and thinking about conceptual issues like the difference between engineering and science. Led by Stanford researchers, the class is using Wii remote controls (available online for anywhere from $15 to $40) to create things like a rat-trap car, a marble roller-coaster, and balloon-powered vehicle to test different theories. With the rat-trap car, students have created a Wii-strapped vehicle with CDs as wheels, like a skateboard.
The Nueva kids are lucky. Related. 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.