What Makes a Great Educational Game? Peek Into Our Game Evaluation Process and GLS 2014

Posted by Andrew Gardner on

There are a ton of really great games out there – but a lot of them never make it into the classroom. Why is this? The reasons include poor distribution, technical challenges, and a lack of teacher supports. Anybody can Google “science games,” but who has time to sort through the thousands of results for something relevant? Or maybe you found a game, but don’t know how to incorporate it into a lesson. Perhaps it doesn’t work properly on the computer attached to the projector. You get the idea. Game evaluation is important.

Our own Will Jordan-Cooley, a GameUp instructional designer, will go into more detail on this topic at the Games, Learning & Society conference in Madison, WI. If you’re attending, come take a look at the challenging road from game studio to teacher curricula and the ways GameUp helps ease the implementation process. Will spends his days vetting and designing games, creating support materials, and refining the considerations for successful implementation. He’ll tell you all about the evaluation process we use for selecting GameUp titles, from the technical to the logistical to the design-related. He’ll also describe our evaluation criteria for “quality,” which combines a standardized set of heuristics with open-ended qualitative analysis. Here’s a peek at the rubric we use when vetting games for GameUp.

Visit the GLS website and get the details on Will’s session.

Our Wisconsin schedule also includes the Playful Learning Lunch Expo on Tuesday, the 10th; the presentation “Anatomy of a Learning Game” with our partner Classroom, Inc. on Wednesday, the 11th; and the Game Publishers Workshop and Teachers’ Perspective Panel on Thursday, the 12th.