For some,
“educational games” mean the simple types that teach counting to preschoolers
or vocabulary words to fourth-graders. They have a hard time seeing how
computerized gamification, currently a flame-hot academic trend, can lend
itself to serious learning for older students.
A couple of
heavy hitters in the education world are betting on gaming to help
high-schoolers build math and science skills. With funding from the Gates
Foundation, the MIT Education Arcade collaborated with Filament Games to create
the Radix Endeavor, a multiplayer online game that sneaks in lessons about
biology, geometry, algebra, probability, and statistics while students explore
a mysterious island world and save its people from destruction.
The game
has the look and feel of something students might play on their Xbox or PlayStation.
Through their on-screen avatars, players must work together to gather and
process information and come up with solutions to help the island’s
inhabitants.
The Radix
Endeavor is still in development, although it recently won a 2015 Cool Tool Award from EdTech Digest in the new
product/service category. Currently, the developers are piloting a free version
of the game to monitor how students interact with it, what they actually learn
from the instruction, and whether gaming can be implemented in a classroom
environment. Teachers can set up an account at no charge for their classes to
try it out.