Startling news from a Play Ethic friend, Eric Zimmerman of GameLab, that they're getting over a million dollars to start up a new school in New York which uses "gaming and design" as its primary teaching methodology. The full press release is in extended post, and they've also included a piece on NPR by Heather Chaplin (another PE friend, and a co-author of the videogame history Smart Bomb.) Here's an exciting chunk of ludological pedagogy for ya:
“We are conceiving the school as a dynamic learning system that takes its cues from the way games are designed, shared and played,” said Katie Salen,Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play. “All players in the school – teachers, students,parents and administrators – will be empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.”
NEW 6th-12th GRADE SCHOOL WILL USE GAMES AND GAME
DESIGN AS PATHWAYS TO CREATIVITY AND LEARNING
$1.1M MACARTHUR FOUNDATION GRANT WILL ACCELERATE PACE
OF EDUCATION INNOVATION IN NEW YORK CITY AND BEYOND
School to Open Fall 2009 in New York City
Co-Designed by Gamelab Institute of Play in
partnership with New Visions for Public Schools
NPR story:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11259040
New York, New York — June XX, 2007. New York City
will be home to a new 6-12th grade public school that
will use game design and game-inspired methods to
teach critical 21st century skills and literacies.
Opening in fall 2009, the school is being created by
the Gamelab Institute of Play, a New York City-based
not-for-profit organization that leverages games and
play as transformative contexts for learning and
creativity, in collaboration with New Visions for
Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that
works in partnership with the New York City Department
of Education to improve academic achievement in the
City’s public schools. The John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation today awarded a grant of $1.1
million to help with planning and development.
Gamelab Institute of Play leverages game design and
its associated literacies as a necessary foundation
for learning, innovation, and change in the 21st
century. By bringing non-traditional audiences of all
ages into the innovative space of game production and
play their design for the school will explore new ways
of thinking, acting, and speaking through playing and
making games in a social world. Students call
themselves writers, designers, readers, performers,
teachers, and students. The Institute calls them
gamers.
“We are conceiving the school as a dynamic learning
system that takes its cues from the way games are
designed, shared and played,” said Katie Salen,
Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play.
“All players in the school – teachers, students,
parents and administrators – will be empowered to
innovate using 21st century literacies that are native
to games and design. This means learning to think
about the world as a set of in interconnected systems
that can be affected or changed through action and
choice, the ability to navigate complex information
networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories,
to see collaboration in competition, and communicate
across diverse social spaces. It means that students
and teachers will engage in their own learning in
powerful ways.”
“This project will reimagine the traditional school
from top to bottom, based on research on how students
today learn best—and will create a new learning
environment that will prepare them for success in
college and the 21st century workforce,” said Robert
Hughes, president of New Visions for Public Schools.
The project aims to change the way schools think about
learning by designing the school from the ground up
around the intrinsic qualities of games and game
culture. And while parents might be concerned about
the amount of screentime or game play an approach such
as this might involve, researchers from fields as
diverse as the learning sciences, literacy studies,
computer science, and anthropology are seeing that
games can and do affect how, when, and where kids
learn. Results of testing with players of Quest
Atlantis, a science-oriented game supported by the
National Science Foundation and MacArthur, for
example, show that students were not simply immersed
in the rich context of the game, but were also
appreciating how knowledge gained in the game about
things like the incubation of living sponges connected
to phenomena in the outside world.
Gamelab Institute of Play will lead a two-year school
development process that will bring together game
design, learning, and literacy experts, educators,
students, and parents to design the school’s vision as
well as its curricular, assessment, technology and
community frameworks. Together, the Institute of Play
and New Visions will ground the development of the
school within the unique context of New York City,
ensuring that the school’s curriculum meets rigorous
graduation standards. Students will design games and
game-inspired materials, learn about the history and
culture of games and play, build communities, and
produce knowledge around the materials and
relationships that result. Such an approach allows
young people to explore the learning space of games
and game driven pedagogy and gives them a platform on
which to build the technical, technological, artistic,
cognitive, social, and linguistic skills they need to
graduate from high school prepared for college and the
world of work.
The project will also serve as a demonstration site,
integrating gaming research developed through
MacArthur’s digital media and learning initiative into
the development of Regents-based curricular pilots,
toolkits to be used by students and teachers to design
activities and experiences, and interactive spatial
prototypes. The development and planning process will
provide a context for synthesizing a body of work
around the ways students are learning, making
decisions, participating, and creating knowledge.
Products created throughout the process will be made
available to the larger education reform community for
sampling, testing and refinement.
Gamelab Institute of Play promotes gaming
literacy--the play, analysis, and creation of
games--as agents of provocation, education, and
change. Through a variety of programs centered on game
design, the Institute of Play engages audiences of all
ages, leveraging games and play as critical contexts
for learning. Through their work the Institute builds
new domains of knowledge connected to games, digital
media and learning, develops innovative curricula
around gaming literacies, fosters new models of
collaboration between students, educators, and
professional game designers, and provides a shared
space for the experimentation and exchange of ideas
across creative, technology, and education sectors.
More information is available at
www.instituteofplay.org.
New Visions for Public Schools, founded in 1989, is
the largest education reform organization dedicated to
improving the quality of education children receive in
New York City's public schools. Working with the
public and private sectors, New Visions develops
programs and policies to energize teaching and
learning and to raise the level of student
achievement. Since 2001, New Visions has spearheaded
the New Century High Schools Initiative and created 83
new small public high schools, offering students and
their families both choice and quality for their high
school education.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a
private, independent grant making institution
dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster
lasting improvement in the human condition.
MacArthur’s $50 million digital media and learning
initiative aims to help determine how digital
technologies are changing the way young people learn,
play, socialize, and participate in civic life. More
information is available at www.macfound.org or
www.digitallearning.macfound.org.
. . . . . . . . .
For more information, please contact:
Katie Salen, Gamelab Institute of Play, 212.675.1101,
katie@institueofplay.org
Robert Hughes, New Visions for Public School,
212-645-5110, rhughes@newvisions. org
Andy Solomon, MacArthur Foundation, 312-726-8000,
asolomon@macfound.org
