Professors receive $500,000 grant to make kids' video game

Video games aren't usually touted as educational tools. But that doesn't mean they can't be. \nThe IU School of Education received a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for research on how video games can help students become good citizens.\nThe game, "Academic Play Spaces: Learning for the 21st Century," will build on "Quest Atlantis," a game created by Sasha Barab, an associate professor of learning sciences in the School of Education.\n"We developed QA because we wanted to engage children in ways we are excited and proud about. Schools have to be focused on content acquisition and standardized tests, and it is hard to enlist larger narratives," Barab said. "This program helps. Educating students for the 21st century requires us to think beyond standard, traditional pedagogical practice."\nQA targets 9 to 12-year-olds and uses a 3-D, multi-user environment to immerse children in educational tasks, according to an IU news release. Like QA, "Learning for the 21st Century" allows students to interact and work together in a fictional, virtual world. \nStudents participate in ethical decision-making, exploring the world and making choices. They also experience alternative options, where consequences unfold with real and immediate impact on virtual characters in the game.\nLee Sheldon, an assistant professor in the IU Department of Telecommunications, and Douglas Thomas, an associate professor in the School of Communications at the University of Southern California, will assist Barab on the project.\n"It's important that we help kids understand what it means to participate in new media," Barab said. "In our schools, we are not necessarily teaching kids how to knowledgably engage these media. We need to support more digital media literacy."\nThe creators of this game want to take the decision making process of video games and focus it toward something that will teach kids about society. \nFor example, in the game, children can visit a 3-D park in which loggers are creating an environmental dilemma, according to the news release. The kids learn about the different viewpoints related to the situation. If the student kicks the loggers out of the park, he or she sees what might happen in that actual situation -- the park could go bankrupt.\n"It is important to get kids to think about what it means to be committed to the environment and how the decisions we make about the environment impact society," Barab said.