Oh, if only these visionaries had been around when I was in the Orange County school system! The OCDE have released a video podcast in their Educational Technology series about the potential of including games in elementary school classrooms. It pulls in all of the usual suspects (and rightly so), including Dr. Henry Jenkins and Dr. James Paul Gee, and is a welcome positive reaction of an educational system to the potential of interactivity.
Game politics covers the surrounding issues quite well, including a small overview of MIT's Augmented Reality game genre, echoing the work NESTA Futurelab's done on this side of the pond. In short, interactivity supplements real-world activities by encouraging students to engage with the learning process rather than being taught through a transmission model. So for example, at MIT, students are provided with palmtops and charged with solving puzzles by taking soil samples and interviewing experts. At Futurelab, one prototype education programme challenges pupils to explore migration and community patterns of lions in the wild. Both MIT and Futurelab have more up their sleeves when it comes to this kind of engaged learning, and it's worth taking a look at their portfolios to be inspired.
The OCDE are also offering a free course on Games and Education today. You can register by following the instructions here.
