Games 4 Change and the Need for Curators of Educational Games

Posted by Andrew Gardner on

Earlier this week, BrainPOP attended and presented at the 2012 Games 4 Change conference (G4C12) here in New York City. Since it’s debut in June 2011, BrainPOP’s GameUp network is making an impact in the emerging field of educational gaming. Our site has seen almost 1,000,000 hours of educational gameplay in less than a year! At G4C, we were delighted to present Case Studies used in the National Survey of Teacher Attitudes about Digital Games in the Classroom, but we were also thrilled to be part of the dialogue about  the impact well designed digital games can have on learners.  Some of the conference highlights were the presentations from author Jane McGonigal about the power of digital games to build physcial, social and psychological resiliency. Nolan Bushnell, entrepreneur and founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese,  spoke about using brain research to develop effective digital games for helping students build basic skills. Using these games would subsequently free up teachers to spend more time teaching higher order thinking and preparing their students for the demands of the information age.

Most exciting for us at the BrainPOP was having educational game guru Professor James Gee come visit our HQ! Dr. Gee play tested one of our newest games, to be debuted next week, and commented on the need for curation of good educational digital games.  You can check out video of all the session, including BrainPOP’s, and the terrific keynotes, including Dr. Gee’s, on the G4C page on the  livestream website.