RIT, the School of Interactive Games & Media, and collaborators across the MAGIC Center have a long history of exploring the creation, use, and deployment of games in classrooms and informal learning settings to understand both the learning process and to impact a large number of fields. From the early days of projects like M.U.P.P.E.T.S. that explored how we teach our own undergraduates to code and communicate in digital environments, to games such as Layoff! (a collaboration with the Tiltfactor Lab and part of the Values at Play initiative) that challenge the public on uncomfortable issues surrounding economic collapse, RIT has supported our work in exploring the ways in which games and media can impact the learning process.
Recently, MAGIC has partnered with Second Ave. Software on several Department of Education grants that create games for middle school Science education (Martha Madison’s Marvelous Machines being one such example), has continued to engage with the Games 4 Learning Institute, the Games+Learning+Society Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and several other partners and agencies as we continue to push the boundary of how games and digital media can impact learning and engagement.
Closer to home, we have been heavily involved in the creation of the Just Press Play project, which seeks to use game elements and playful learning theory to better equip students in the transition to campus life and academic exploration in a whimsical, yet meaningful way. You can read more about these individual projects, their impact, and related work on the individual pages for these works, and if you have an idea or concept for a game or simulation that impact the learning process, don’t hesitate to contact us!