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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Monday, 27 August 2001

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- As a new generation of students heads "back to school" -- from pre-kindergarten through college -- broader uses of interactive technologies such as web-based applications, DVDs, video and computer games are becoming increasingly integral to teachining and learning. Researchers in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies today announced plans to launch two new efforts that integrate classroom experience with web-based instruction and expand definitions of educational media to include "games-to-teach."

NEW PROJECT: GAMES-TO-TEACH
The Games-to-Teach Project involves an interdisciplinary collaboration of faculty, staff, and students across the humanities, sciences, and engineering that will develop a series of conceptual prototypes for "games-to-teach" science and engineering subjects at the advanced high school and introductory college level. As part of Microsoft i-Campus, a five-year research alliance between MIT and Microsoft, the Games-to-Teach Project intends to explore best practices in game design and production, current educational theory, and emerging technological platforms and to apply such understandings to new models of computer and video games that present and explore educational content.

"Until now we've seen so-called 'edutainment' that has all of the entertainment value of a bad lecture and the educational value of a bad game," said Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies and principal investigator on the project. "Our goal is to reverse that polarity by combining MIT-quality science and engineering subjects with state-of-the-art game design."

Jenkins and his colleagues believe computer and video games are emerging as a powerful new teaching medium that enables robust interactivity, providing for new pedagogical models and stronger collaborations across disciplines. Pointing to an industry that this year will report domestic sales totals that are roughly equivalent to Hollywood's take at the box office and a battery of new creative products, Jenkins sees an industry that has finally begun to understand its basic building blocks and is now stretching out on new directions, experimenting with new forms, and diversifying audiences. "Teachers need to take notice and explore ways to leverage this new medium in developing their teaching strategies, allowing for new learning exeriences among a broad range of student abilities and media literacies," Jenkins said.

Through weekly lab seminars and creative development workshops, Jenkins and his team plan to explore the "best practices" of interactive teaching tools, define corresponding pedagogical models, and begin to test assumptions through the development of a dozen conceptual prototypes that will focus on subjects from biology to physics, from mechanical engineering to chemical engineering, and from applied mathematics to materials science.

"As humanists at one of the world's leading technological institutions, we're in a unique position to think about the intersection of science and culture," said Jenkins. "The challenge of the Games-to-Teach Project will be to create science and engineering content in a compelling form that students want to engage with, where they want to explore, and where they can experiment with new ideas."

Jenkins hopes the conceptual prototypes developed within the project provide the games industry and government agencies with the blueprints for exploring full-scale development, production, and release of "games to teach" in coming years.

COMPARATIVE MEDIA STUDIES
Comparative Media Studies is the humanistic and social scientific examination of media technologies and their cultural, social, aesthetic, political, ethical, legal, and economic implications. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students in the program are trained to think critically about the unique properties of different media and about the shared properties and functions of media more generally. More than 30 faculty from a wide variety of disciplines in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences aim to teach the next generation of leaders in industry, journalism, government, the arts, and the academy to think across media and investigate issues central to the role of media in today's world: current research topics include, interactivity, narrative, and hypertextuality; childhood and adolescence in a mediated culture; informed citizenry and cultures of democarcy; and, media in transition.

See Also:

NEW COURSE: MEDIA, EDUCATION, AND THE MARKETPLACE
"Media, Education, and the Marketplace," (http://web.mit.edu/miyagawa/www) a new course that explores how emerging forms of interactive media fundamentally transform the learning process. Fuji-Xerox, with Sony and NTT, are providing platform and technical support for this new couse, which integrates both classroom lecttures and on-line learning and provides a first-hand example of the teaching and learning potentials being harnessed by new interactive and telecommunications media. "This is one of our first attempts at integrating theory and practice in teaching a course on educational media," said Professor Shigeru Miyagawa, who designed the course following his own experiences in developing several educational media properties. "With the arrival of broadband and other delivery platforms, educators will have at their fingertips a broader set of tools to teach. Our goal is to develop that toolkit," Miyagawa added.

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Copyright 2001, MIT