ABSTRACT
Within the past decade, an increasing number of researchers around the world have been investigating the effi cacy of using computer games for education. Researchers at Northwestern, UCLA, Georgetown, and Texas share the NSF-funded Children’s Digital Media Center; Michigan State has the Communication Technology Lab, which has been developing educational multimedia for 20 years, as well as the new Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab; and MIT features the Education Arcade program. There is every reason to believe that this relatively new and highly popular mass medium will make a powerful platform for education (Gee, 2004; Prensky, 2000). In addition to commanding tremendous amounts of player attention and time, games can be tailored to individual ability levels, can facilitate individual study through repetition or discovery, and can simulate just about any phenomenon a teacher might want students to understand. In fact, computer games can be used to do many things in a classroom that are not otherwise possible (e.g., simulate a billion years of geophysical development).
