The Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin has been supporting youth health education programs through their Children’s Health Education Center (CHEC) for the past twelve years.  In 2004 the Center started the www.bluekids.org program to focus their efforts on reaching youth, educators, and parents via the Internet. Over 12,000 students participated in CHEC’s teacher-facilitated game-based learning curriculum last semester alone.  When tasked with quantifying the impact of interactive web-based programs on youth behavior and attitudes, CHEC and researchers at the Children’s Hospital have come up with very positive preliminary results.

Many professional associations are taking a second look at eLearning for revenue generation or for recruitment appeal to the next generation to take interest in their profession. Today Web Courseworks’ games and simulations group released an educational game on the Internet casual game circuit.  The game Gridlock Buster is designed to engage and motivate teens and young adults to seek out more information about traffic engineering.  The Institute of Traffic Studies (ITS) at the University of Minnesota funded the game to supplement a classroom-based summer camp curriculum. Associations responsible for increasing teenager interest in a specific occupations should visit Krongregate and play.

I’ll confess that I may not have been at the ASTD conference every day this past week, but I do have some impressions of the event I’d like to share.

I am helping a game-based learning client work on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant (thank you for the tip, Anne Derryberry). My thoughts are connected to our Games Can Teach blog’s on-going discussions concerning the definition of game-based learning and the different types of gaming as well as the research needed. To be sure, there have been ample grants to universities for various studies on the aspects of video games and learning which has provided evidence based research to act on. This interest in video games and learning has had an influence on my practice. We recently developed a new version of an ATOD prevention curriculum, which in 2004 used arcade games to reinforce the lecture style slide shows.

Tony Karrer asks a great question in his blog post: “What is good writing?” It is really all about context. Although I agree that concise and bullet-pointed writing can be worthwhile in certain contexts, I do believe that teaching fundamentals is the first priority of a K-12 writing curriculum.

A quick search of Wikipedia finds that we need to do some work documenting and updating the definition of “serious game” and “game-based learning” -- at least in Wikipedia. Consider this post a call for “all hands on deck!”