On a beautiful Californian day I was lucky to meet Mike, a producer at Glasslab
Located in Zynga’s offices – really cool ones – the new company blends very high quality learning with gaming and aims at making money out of this process. Seems that nothing impossible in the Silicon Valley…
At first I doubted. I am used to meaningless games (I apologize here to my little brother) and even though if I am highly convinced by the fact that games can help people to learn, the part when gamers actually manage to create qualitative online pedagogical experiences wasn’t so clear to me.
I am glad Mike proved me wrong! Thanks to the Gates and McArthur foundations, GlassLab has been working on creating innovative games that allow them to both develop the skills their users need in the 21st century and to collect meaningful data about them to help then pursue their learning experience after the game with other types of material. GlassLab doesn’t only focus on the games but they also create the infrastructure to use the games within the classroom. They base all their work on research, they make sure bast practices are shared among educators and work to improve the assessment part. Their next step is to train and empower the teachers to use the games in the classroom and to improve their products based on their on-going feedback.
More than games, GlassLab is developing dynamic adaptive learning tools and they are smart enough to include human nature in the process. Let’s play!
http://glasslabgames.org/