In this article in the Education Update Online, Andrew Gardner analyzes the uses of virtual world simulations, serious games, and game design in educational environments. He explores a few examples, including Civilization, a resource management strategy game in which the goal is to build an effective civilization.

Radford University professor and National Science Foundation award recipient Matt Dunleavy, is leading a team of students from the School of Teacher Education and Leadership (STEL) in collaboration with Harvard University, MIT, Hewlett Packard Labs and Radford City Public Schools in an effort to explore opportunities for augmented reality in the Radford, Virginia elementary school district. According to this article from The Radford Times, Dunleavy is heading the Radford Outdoor Augmented Reality Project (ROAR) for which he received a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant. Dunleavy will be investigating the types of skills that can be acquired and honed from the integration of real-world/environmental play and computer-generated data. The game that ROAR will test in November will examine the combination of locative games with the school district's Learning Standards requirements. The research team will implement the games in outdoor environments, such as schoolyards, and use handheld devices, such as Global Positioning Systems, to aid and enhance game play.

This past summer, the Institute of Play conducted its month-long Summer Teacher Institute with a small group of 6th and 7th grade New York City teachers. During the course of the workshop, the teachers collaborated with IoP's game designers and curriculum specialists on work with the game-based pedagogy that is at the heart of the proposed school, Quest to Learn. The teams developed a set of core curricula, games, and toolkits that are being piloted in the teachers' classrooms this Fall.

This video captures a recent session with Ayesha Randolph's 7th grade Creative Writing students at the Calhoun School. As part of the 21st Century Writers mission, developed in conjunction with the Institute of Play, Ayesha's students play the game 'Once Upon a Time' as well as create their own story cards to brainstorm ideas, story structure and understand the elemental components of a story (i.e. plot, setting, character, and conflict).

The Institute of Play and Arizona State University’s K-12 Embodied Media and Learning group have been developing a suite of game-based learning models in SMALLab (Situated Multimeda Art Learning Lab), a mixed reality learning environment developed by ASU’s David Birchfield.

In this video, David Birchfield is playtesting the Titration* scenario at Consortia Night, Parsons Design and Technology program, October 16 2008.

* Titrate (Chemistry): to ascertain the quantity of a given constituent by adding a liquid reagent of known strength and measuring the volume necessary to convert the constituent to another form.