AERA has released 31 “Ed-Talk” videos that feature leading education scholars discussing cutting-edge research on a range of important education and learning issues.

How the power of games inspires solutions to today’s biggest challenges By Lara Cole For Sasha Barab, professor of innovation in ASU’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and professor of education in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, it’s “game on” as he and his team create virtual solutions to society’s challenges. […]

A first-of-its kind event in education research, the Forum aimed to connect the science and scholarship of education research to policy and practice emphasizing the value of diverse expertise.

What does the future hold? SFIS encourages scientists and citizens alike to shape a desirable tomorrow. How?

This new e-book explores the potential of multi-user videogames for bringing about academic and pro-social ends.

The Center for Games and Impact at ASU has partnered with Intel to innovate around their online teacher professional development courses. Intel, a leader in online teacher PD has trained millions of teachers around the globe through its Engage program. ASU Center for Games and Impact is a leader in investigating, innovating, and cultivating games for […]

This week the Center for Games & Impact team spent a day with a group of middle school children as part of their summer STEM career camp experience. The students were interested in what it takes to get started in a career in game design and development. The morning started with sharing about how games […]

The Arizona State University (ASU) Center for Games & Impact (CGI) is awarded Educational Testing Service (ETS) grant to explore affordances of game-based assessments.

When PBS KIDS today finally launches its own online world for children ages 6-9, it’ll allow kids to build and show off their creations, DeWitt said, but it’ll be…

RSVP below to join us to hear Professor Reed Stevens talk, “Cyborg learning: How our increasingly mobile and networked lives transform the possibilities for learning and education”.

[B]efore the project began and workers picked up tools, community members were asked to pick up a keyboard and mouse and reimagine this park inside of Minecraft.

This Challenge requires Solvers to present their ideas for a mobile phone game which can educate 5-14 year old children about better hygiene practices and persuade…

Foldit is the classic discovery game. An intriguing scientific problem is turned into a playful challenge and suddenly thousands of ordinary people begin contributing…

Game design documents are a great way to get a video game idea up and running, keep organized, and make sure all bases are covered. However, not everyone on a team…

Join us for the first CGI Brown Bag Speaker of 2015! Professor Rikke Magnussen, visiting from Aalborg University of Denmark, will talk about community driven science learning games, and scientific discovery games for science education. Magnussen will share insights from four years of research into these types of games related to: 1) students reflective embodied […]

ASU Teachers College’s graduate programs are listed in the top 20 (among 245 public and private graduate programs nationwide) of the 2015 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings released earlier this year. In Arizona, the Teachers College ranks first among graduate programs in the state. Masters candidates and graduates looking to take […]

This month we will highlight games that our players thought might made good holiday gift ideas. In this first post check out game gift ideas for teens through adults.

The Games & Impact Cycling Team is blogging, and racing, their way to better health. In this post, getting started with using data to achieve fitness goals.

So, you want to make a video game. You have an idea already in mind with the art style, mechanics, sounds, and everything else. All you need now is a team of people to get the project moving forward, right? Here is the best advice I have: slow down. You are not going anywhere until […]

Announcing the Games & Impact Cycling Team. Support our fundraising efforts for Special Olympics El Tour de Tucson on November 22, 2014.

What We’re Playing is a twice-a-month series from the Center for Games & Impact Innovation Lab highlighting some of the interesting games we have played, whether work-related or not. Please join in and comment with your takes on the games mentioned, or to share what you’ve recently played that has left an impression on you. Check […]

Four high-impact grants totaling $17 million have been awarded to Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University by the U.S. Department of Education (DOE).

The Center for Games & Impact is incredibly proud to announce that the Joan Ganz Cooney Center has officially released their case study about the innovative teacher training program Quest2Teach. This initiative is created in partnership by the Center, E-Line Media, the Sanford Inspire Program, and ASU Teachers College faculty and leaders including, Professor Jim Gee, Dean […]

In this presentation, Professor Sasha Barab will first share why games  provide such potential as an innovative curriculum. Based on these  big ideas, he will share learning impact guides available at the ASU Center for Games & Impact and designed to help players, parents, and teachers unlock the power that exists in commercial and educational […]

What We’re Playing is a twice-a-month series from the Center for Games & Impact Innovation Lab highlighting some of the interesting games we have played, whether work-related or not. Please join in and comment with your takes on the games mentioned, or to share what you’ve recently played that has left an impression on you. Check […]

What We’re Playing is a twice-a-month series highlighting some of the interesting games we have played, whether work-related or not. This week: Destiny. Have you played?

CGI lead game designer, Doug Woolsey, and his game project, Sand Hat Games, realized funding for their card game, Vye: The Card Game of Capture and Control, less than 24 hours from launch on Tuesday. The Sand Hat Games team, made of Woolsey, and colleagues Joe Morrissey and Vince D`Amelio, are veteran game developers who […]

Recognizing education as a universal pathway toward a better world, MLFTC at ASU announced the formation of its new Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education.

I spent some time today catching up on interesting reads in the world of eSports today and noticed the president of ESPN, John Skipper, mentioned he does not consider eSports to be sports. Here’s Skipper’s quote taken from re/code: “It’s not a sport — it’s a competition. Chess is a competition. Checkers is a competition,” said […]

Social Media top five reads on Facebook and Twitter.

Welcome to the first of our new “What We’re Playing” blog series at the Center for Games & Impact. At the Center, we take the power of video games to bring about positive social impact very seriously. And, we also just enjoy playing new (or, new to us) games, sharing these experiences with you and […]

[View the story “Top 5 Games from GLS 10 Showcase” on Storify]

Research on video games teaching youth is building at ASU.

First of its kind Impact-Based Research (IBR) Conference hosted by ASU in collaboration with the Center for Games & Impact, E-Line Media, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and the ASU College of Public Programs.

The growth of electronic sports — better known as eSports — has been rapid over the last two years. The term eSports is an umbrella that describes the competitive gaming community based around real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, and multiplayer online battle arena games where teams of four or more compete for trophies and prize […]

Impact Games & Middle School Curriculum At the Center for Games & Impact we envision a world where we understand and optimize the unique power of games for learning and social impact. One of the central ways we work to make our vision a reality is through innovative games and game-infused solutions for education. Together […]

Are you the parent or guardian of a child between 4 and 13 years of age? Do your children play video games? If so, you are eligible to take a survey about digital games and family life, co-sponsored by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and Arizona State University. Parents who complete the […]

If you didn’t catch the first post in our Round Up Series, make sure to give it a look. Last week’s post highlighted the exponentially growing world of eSports. This week, I asked the team to share what they have been playing. Never Enough eSports To start, some of us are still taking a look […]

Welcome to the Round Up Series This is the first post for our new weekly round up series for the Center for Games & Impact blog. At the Center we are all dedicated to games and positive social impact but our team members work in a variety of disciplines. I love hearing about what everyone […]

Journalism and Impact Games  I started 2013 with a question: What would it mean to teach journalists to design newsgames? After talking the idea over with my colleagues at the Center for Games & Impact and connecting with Retha Hill and the New Media Innovation Lab at the Cronkite School we spent the spring 2013 semester […]

Music and art have the potential to affect our emotional states and even our perception of the world around us. Games for impact, more than simply contexts for actions taken in the world, are about what we feel and understand. They draw power and potential from key elements of music and art to do their work on […]

Summer Camp: Crafts… Glue… Game Design? For many people summer time childhood memories conjure images of bike riding, swimming, cartoon marathons, or popsicle sticks and glue while doing crafts at summer camp. For a new generation of kids growing up with ubiquitous computing, summer also means playing videogames, and learning computer programming and game design. In fact, for the past two weeks […]

Gamestar Mechanic is not just about one person sitting at a computer creating their own game, although it can be. A big part of the Gamestar Mechanic experience is the interaction with other people. Since the most common application of the game is in a classroom setting, the player is rarely creating by themselves. The […]

Developer: Ubisoft  Release Date: October 30th, 2012 Availability: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Wii U Cost: $59.99 ESRB Rating: M (Mature) What’s it About? It is 2012 and the world is about to end. Desmond Miles, a modern-day assassin, is tasked with saving it, using a special virtual reality machine known as the Animus. Through this, […]

Critical thinking, problem solving, and imagination important skills for kids today. Gamestar Mechanic, December’s game of the month, produced by E-Line Media, encourages players to use these these abilities to get through the game. At its core, Gamestar Mechanic is a game about games. In the first half, players learn how to play by being […]

November brings with it the next Game of the Month: Portal. Valve’s 2007 release and its 2011 sequel, Portal 2, place the player in control of protagonist Chell; a mysterious and silent test subject at Aperture Laboratories who wakes from a state of stasis at the start of the original Portal game. Made to complete […]

Developer: Arkane Studios Release Date: October 9th, 2012 Availability: PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 Cost: $59.99 ESRB Rating: M (Mature) What’s it About? Corvo Attano, Lord Protector of Dunwall’s Empress Jessamine Kaldwin, returns home for an assignment abroad only to bear witness to the brutal murder of the Empress by supernatural assassins. When he is found […]

Over the last two weeks, we’ve introduced you to the ins and outs of Minecraft in terms of its gameplay and its impact. These, when combined, help to create a game that thrives in an educational setting, one that The Center for Games and Impact boasts as one of its core games. We focus deeply […]

This is part three in a three part series on defining Minecraft as an impact game. Did you miss the previous posts in the series? Check out Defining an Impact Game: Minecraft and Environmental Sustainability and Defining an Impact Game: Minecraft and Engaged Citizenship! Self-powered railroad using redstone circuitry. Decorating the inside of a small house […]

CGI Q&A with ASU Fellow Dr. Michelene (Micki) Chi Professor, Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Arizona State University CGI: Please tell me about your work and the ICAP hypothesis. Dr. Chi: I like to know about an area of research that has been a problem for many, many years. […]

This is part two in a three part series on defining Minecraft as an impact game. Did you miss the first post in the series? Check out Defining an Impact Game: Minecraft and Environmental Sustainability! A server spawn point. Player created shops. When we apply engaged citizenship to games, we look at the different forms […]

If you read last week’s post, then hopefully you have a better understanding of what Minecraft is and how it works as both a game and a source of learning and impact. Minecraft itself is a beautifully formless experience and we strive to encourage others to define it not only through looking at its gameplay […]

With the Presidential Election only just a month away, it is important to look at the impact of political games on the election as well as how people learn about the election process. While political games of the past have been little more than new renditions of old games which include the faces or views […]

When talking about Minecraft, people tend to ask the same question: ‘What exactly is Minecraft?’ Sometimes they rephrase themselves by saying: ‘What is Minecraft about?’ The answer remains very much the same. Minecraft isn’t really about anything at all. As a first person, sandbox-based, open world game, Minecraft has no particular narrative. The gameplay is, at […]

Foundations, universities, government agencies and non-profits that fund games to further their learning, health and social impact goals are game publishers – and yet most do not realize it. These research and impact focused organizations did not set out to become game publishers and certainly do not consider themselves game publishers, but they have taken on all of the key functions of a game publisher.

Computer and video games have emerged as one of the most powerful mediums of the 21st Century, generating billions of hours of highly engaged entertainment and surpassing even the film industry in terms of revenues. A growing body of research is also highlighting the enormous potential of games to drive meaningful and measurable learning, health […]

”Education is about creating human beings who are civic minded and feel that they count.” – Dr. James Paul Gee Watch Dr. Gee’s talk on creating “Big G” games for impact and how these games can change the way we approach education, society, and real world problem solving at 9th annual Games for Change festival […]

“Reality is broken. Game designers can fix it.” So says JaneMcGonigal, game designer and researcher, when talking about her quest to use massive multiplayer gaming to solve social problems facing the world today. Her point is provocative and the argument is persuasive. However, it can be contended that the point is slightly different than the basic […]