Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

1.20.11 | Writing at Mashable.com, Melissa Jun Rowley this week surveys the use of games for social change in government, education, NGO’s and business. She notes that as “the fastest growing segment of entertainment,” gaming is “evolving into a new force of digital activism and facilitating social change.”

“It’s not enough anymore to say, ‘I’ve got 100,000 people playing a game,’” Asi Burak, co-president of the New York City-based nonprofit Games for Change and co-founder of Impact Games, told Mashable. “What needs to be asked is ‘what happened to the players as a result? Did they change their behavior?’”

Burak knows this field well. He was part of a team of students from Carnegie Mellon University’s Master of Entertainment Technology program that created the game “PeaceMaker,” now produced by Impact Games, in which players assume the role of an Israeli or Palestinian leader and work toward crafting a peace agreement.

Colleen Macklin, associate professor of design and technology at Parsons The New School for Design, said that games are powerful because of their ability to help players understand complex systems.

“Games are an excellent tool for modeling and playing with all kinds of systems, economic, social and cultural,” Macklin said.

Macklin is working on “Mannahatta the Game,” developed by PETLab and members of the New Youth City Learning Network. The game maps the city of Manhattan’s historical ecosystem, giving players points as they connect ecological elements that existed back in the year 1609.

Read the full post here.

Vote for Your Favorite STEM Video Game

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has received quite a group of entrants for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, and you’re invited to vote for your favorites.

In the games submitted, young players get to be city planners, ancient healers, ship captains, world explorers, and travelers through the human body, learning math and science concepts along the way. 

Sponsored by the Cooney Center and E-Line Media, the competition will award prizes to mobile games that teach science, technology, engineering and math.

Votes from the public will determine the winner for the People’s Choice award, to be announced in March. You can vote from now until Feb. 25. The winner will be eligible to promote the game at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference in 2012.

You can check out the entries and vote for your favorites here.