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Investment in Games for Education and Learning: A Look at Singapore & Wisconsin
Posted by Hsing Wei on 10-29-09Singapore’s Media Development Authority (MDA) recently invested $6 million to promote games in education & learning. The new initiative will support the development and deployment of up to 24 game titles for school-based education and other domains such as defense and healthcare. A resource center will support developers through access to toolkits, platforms and facilities. Part of the motivation to promote the use of games in the learning sphere is driven by a transformation of the business model to a large-scale distribution model. Traditionally, serious games are developed on a client by client basis, with content highly customized for a single client. With this initiative, MDA aims to co-invest in promising projects which can be “re-skinned” into generic commercial off-the-shelf titles for different clients and purposes.
Domestically, a research team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was recently awarded $4.5 million in federal (NSF) grants; the most significant portion towards creating a research consortium to develop technology that will let computers teach real-world problem-solving. The team will use data from the play of “Urban Science,” a game where students learn about math, science and technology by working as urban planners guided by adult mentors. The researchers will collect data on what the students and adult mentors do in the game to create computer-generated, artificially intelligent characters in game to coach students. Similar to the Singapore MDA initiative’s notion of leveraging initial investments in development, says Professor David Shaffer, principal investigator on three of the four grants, “Once we know how to create computer-generated mentors for this game, we can provide mentoring as part of any educational game.”
How to sidestep resource intensive, brute force game development is also something that Michael Mateas, a new associate professor at UC Santa Cruz, has been thinking about. He’s working to create an intelligent authoring tool to simplify the level of technical expertise required to create interactive dramas. “We’re at a threshold, just beginning to create a medium that in many ways is as broad as writing,” Mateas said. “Anything you can imagine conveying in writing or film, you can potentially do in computational media in a way that makes it amenable to a level of exploration and reflection that is not possible in those other media… I want to enable everyday people to create games about topics that are important to them without having to hire a big team of experts.” More of his thoughts here.