Game School

About | Players | School Creation Team | Advisors

More masterful in the world today than they were yesterday a generation of gamers has pointed the way toward a powerful new model for learning institutions of the future. Soon New York City will be home to a new 6-12th grade public school that will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st century skills and literacies. Opening in fall 2009, the school is being created by the Gamelab Institute of Play, a New York City-based not-for-profit organization that leverages games and play as transformative contexts for learning and creativity, in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, a not-for-profit organization that works in partnership with the New York City Department of Education to improve academic achievement in the City's public schools. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recently awarded a grant of $1.1 million to help with planning and development.

empowered to innovate using 21st century literacies that are native to games and design. This means learning to think about the world as a set of in interconnected systems that can be affected or changed through action and choice, the ability to navigate complex information networks, the power to build worlds and tell stories, to see collaboration in competition, and communicate across diverse social spaces. It means that students and teachers will engage in their own learning in powerful ways.

The project aims to change the way schools think about learning by designing the school from the ground up around the intrinsic qualities of games and game culture. And while parents might be concerned about the amount of screentime or game play an approach such as this might involve, researchers from fields as diverse as the learning sciences, literacy studies, computer science, and anthropology are seeing that games can and do affect how, when, and where kids learn. Results of testing with players of Quest Atlantis, a science-oriented game supported by the National Science Foundation and MacArthur, for example, show that students were not simply immersed in the rich context of the game, but were also appreciating how knowledge gained in the game about things like the incubation of living sponges connected to phenomena in the outside world.

Gamelab Institute of Play will lead a two-year school development process that will bring together game design, learning, and literacy experts, educators, students, and parents to design the school¹s vision as well as its curricular, assessment, technology and community frameworks. Together, the Institute of Play and New Visions will ground the development of the school within the unique context of New York City, ensuring that the school¹s curriculum meets rigorous graduation standards. Students will design games and game-inspired materials, learn about the history and culture of games and play, build communities, and produce knowledge around the materials and relationships that result. Such an approach allows young people to explore the learning space of games and game driven pedagogy and gives them a platform on which to build the technical, technological, artistic, cognitive, social, and linguistic skills they need to graduate from high school prepared for college and the world of work.

The project will also serve as a demonstration site, integrating gaming research developed through MacArthur¹s digital media and learning initiative into the development of Regents-based curricular pilots, toolkits to be used by students and teachers to design activities and experiences, and interactive spatial prototypes. The development and planning process will provide a context for synthesizing a body of work around the ways students are learning, making decisions, participating, and creating knowledge. Products created throughout the process will be made available to the larger education reform community for sampling, testing and refinement. Top

Players
New Visions for Public Schools, founded in 1989, is the largest education reform organization dedicated to improving the quality of education children receive in New York City's public schools. Working with the public and private sectors, New Visions develops programs and policies to energize teaching and learning and to raise the level of student achievement. Since 2001, New Visions has spearheaded the New Century High Schools Initiative and created 83 new small public high schools, offering students and their families both choice and quality for their high school education.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a private, independent grant making institution dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the human condition. MacArthur¹s $50 million digital media and learning initiative aims to help determine how digital technologies are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. More information is available at www.macfound.org or www.digitallearning.macfound.org. Top

School Creation Team
Maryann Dickar, school principal
Maryann Dickar is a professor of Secondary Education at New York University, with a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota (2000). Her research explores the potential of and contradictions within urban schooling. She has published articles on the racial identities of urban teachers, the induction of new teachers into urban schools, and the politics of code-switching for Black inner-city students. She is preparing the final draft of a book on the cultural production of space by students, school officials and teachers in an urban high school to examine the role of student resistance in shaping schooling and school reform. Professor Dickar is also a teacher educator working with pre-service Social Studies teachers and directed NYU¹s Alternative Certification Initiative which prepared teachers for struggling middle schools in New York City. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, she taught Social Studies for 6 years in a Brooklyn high school and became a founding coach of its debate team.

Katie Salen, lead designer
Katie Salen is the Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play, and Associate Professor in the Design and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design. Co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as the Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press, she is currently working as lead designer on a digital game designed to teach game design to middle school and high school youth. She recently served as editor for the volume The Ecology of Games for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning, set for publication in 2007. She writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. Katie was a contributing writer for RES magazine, and worked as an animator on Richard Linklater's critically acclaimed animated feature Waking Life. In 2003-04 she partnered with screenwriter and director Hampton Fancher (Minus Man; Bladerunner) on a project for the XEN division of Microsoft to develop an animated storytelling experience distributed through Xbox Live. She teaches and lectures widely, and has helped curate programs at the Lincoln Center, Cinematexas, ZKM, Exploding Cinema, and the Walker Art Center on machinima, the practice of creating animated films using game engines. www.gamersmob.com

Robert Torres, New Visions coach
Robert has worked as a teacher, school principal and education consultant since 1988. His work has focused mostly on school design and currently runs a not for profit which designs small progressive high schools across New York City. Robert wrote and produced a documentary film on the impact of poverty on his Puerto Rican family in New York. The film, Nuyorican Dream, premiered at the Sundance 2000 Film Festival, was acquired by and aired on HBO, and has won numerous awards in the United States and abroad. The documentary offers observations and about the legacy of colonialism, the inadequate American inner-city educational system and discrimination. Robert completed his bachelors with a double major in English and Spanish literature form Oberlin College. Additionally, he completed a Masters in policy and school administration at Bank Street College of Education and was a Stanford University Research Fellow. Currently Robert is pursuing a doctorate focused on games and learning at New York University. Each Wednesday, Robert hosts bingo night at Chucky Cheese.

Alice Robison, MIT
Alice J. Robison is a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, where she writes and teaches about literacy and new media, especially videogames. At MIT Alice also consults with the MacArthur Foundation's New Media Literacies Project and advises several student-run organizations devoted to the study of videogames and interactive media. Side projects include consulting jobs with publishers, developers, and curriculum designers working on new media initiatives. For more, see http://alicerobison.org

Eric Zimmerman, Gamelab
Eric Zimmerman is Co-founder and Director of Game Design at Gamelab. After a childhood of roping friends and family into playtesting his game experiments, Eric has spent the last thirteen years in the game industry. Before founding Gamelab with Peter Lee in 2000, Eric helped create the interactive division at R/GA, and co-founded the interdisciplinary design studio Flat. He collaborated with Word.com on the underground online hit, SiSSYFiGHT 2000 (www.sissyfight.com). Other pre-Gamelab titles include the PC CD-ROM games Gearheads (Philips Media, 1996) and The Robot Club (Southpeak Interactive, 1998). Eric has taught game design at MIT, NYU, Parsons School of Design, and School of Visual Arts. He is the co-author with Katie Salen of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals and The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2004 & 2006). He is the co-editor with Amy Schulman of RE:PLAY Game Design and Game Culture (Peter Lang, 2003). Eric has published and lectured extensively about game design and game culture, and has exhibited game projects at galleries and museums in the US and abroad.

Robert Hughes, President, New Visions
Robert L. Hughes was appointed President of New Visions in June 2000. A prominent lawyer, Mr. Hughes formerly served as Deputy Director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a coalition of parent organizations, community school boards, concerned citizens and advocacy groups that seeks to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City. Mr. Hughes recently served as Co-Counsel in the nationally watched Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York state constitutional challenge. Prior to joining Campaign for Fiscal Equity in 1993, Mr. Hughes was Deputy Director for Advocates for Children, a leading non-profit agency long active in securing quality and equal public education services for New York City's most impoverished and vulnerable families. Mr. Hughes received his undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and his law degree from Stanford Law School. Mr. Hughes' articles on public education have appeared in the Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the Connecticut Law Review, the Journal of Law and Education and the Yale Journal of Law and Policy.

Ron Chaluisan, VP of Programs, New Visions
Mr. Chaluisan has extensive experience leading high school transformation, including 15 years of experience in New York City public schools. Before becoming Vice President of Programs, he was the Director of Small Schools at New Visions and, since 2002, led the comprehensive process of providing a wide range of supports to new and existing small schools throughout the City. From 1994 to 2002, he served as the co-founder and principal of The New York City Museum School, a New Visions small school collaboration between Community School District 2 and the American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the South Street Seaport Museum.

Gloria Rakovic, Director, New Visions
Gloria Rakovic joined New Visions in 2002 having served as a principal in urban and suburban environments including three public New York City high schools. Dr. Rakovic has an extensive background in high school redesign, alternative education, and group facilitation. She helped found and served as principal of Park East High School and the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology. Dr. Rakovic has also worked on the design teams of five other high schools in the city. Top

Advisors
James Paul Gee
James Paul Gee is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD in linguistics in 1975 from Stanford University and has published widely in linguistics and education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacies Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003) offers 36 reasons why good video games produce better learning conditions than many of today's schools. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us to better understand deep human learning and lead us in thinking about the reform of schools. His latest book, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and have the capacity to empower people.

Mizuko Ito
Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, focusing on children and youths changing relationships to media and communications. Her research group at Keio University studies mobile phone use, and she is working with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Diane Harley on a multi-year project on digital kids and informal learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation. As part of this, she's doing case studies of anime fandoms in Japan and the English-speaking online world. She is co-editor a book entitled, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life (2005), and is a Research Scientist at the Annenberg Center for Communication and a Teaching Fellow at the Anthropology Department at the University of Southern California. Past workplaces include the Institute for Research on Learning, Xerox PARC, Tokyo University, the National Institute for Educational Research in Japan, and Apple Computer.

Randy Swearer
Randy Swearer has extensive experience in design related fields, strategic planning, and program development. He has worked in business, academia, and government. Randy worked at Wang Laboratories and IBM before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked at UT for ten years, and was a co-founder of the Design Division. He served as Deputy Director of the Design Program at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. Most recently, Randy was Dean of Parsons School of Design in New York, one of the largest and most respected design institutions in the world, with affiliate campuses in four countries. Randy is currently a consultant specializing in strategic planning and program development. He recently worked with the University of Texas System to envision an inter-campus advanced design research consortium.

Peter Seung-Taek Lee
Peter Lee is the co-founder of Gamelab, a New York City-based game development company and on the Board of Directors for the Gamelab Institute of Play. Peter is a digital media renaissance man, equally skilled in visual design, game design, and game programming. Peter began his career as a designer for TIME online, where he designed the award-winning web content feature "Last Call: Face of Alcoholism." He has held a number of positions since then, including Director of Technology at Churchill Communications, a New Jersey-based Medical Communication Company, where he managed web and CD-ROM projects and lead IT research and technical development. Peter also worked with the Game division at Funny Garbage, developing several online games for the Cartoon Network website. He currently holds an Adjunct Professorship at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and Parsons School of Design, and has lectured on the subjects of Game Design and Development.

Jane McGonigal
Jane McGonigal is a game designer and games researcher specializing in massively collaborative play. In 2006, she was named to MIT Technology Review's list of the top 35 young innovators changing the world through technology, in recognition of her work to develop games that teach collective intelligence. In 2007, she became the first woman to deliver a keynote talk at the Game Developers Conference, where she presented her research on reality-based games that cultivate network literacy and cultural participation skills in youth. She has a PhD in performance studies from the University of California at Berkeley, where she completed a dissertation on the impact of an increasingly ubiquitous gaming culture on the everyday cognitive frameworks, public participation, and social identities of game players. Currently, she is a researcher and resident game designer for the Institute for the Future, a think tank that seeks to solve pressing social problems by generating forecasts of future trends in technology, education, health care, government, and business.

Miodrag Mitrasinovic
Architect, author, Associate Professor at Parsons the New School for Design. Designs and academic research published in Metropolis, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Journal of Architecture and Building Science of the Architectural Institute of Japan and elsewhere. Author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate 2006), and also co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (with J. Traganou) forthcoming from Ashgate in 2007; both books are recipients of the prestigious Graham Foundation grant in 2004 and 2005. Taught, lectured and reviewed student projects at a number of architecture and design schools including the University of Texas at Austin, Pratt Institute, The Berlage Institute, Kyoto University, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, University of Belgrade, and others. Ph.D. in Architecture, University of Florida at Gainesville. MArch, Berlage Institute, the Netherlands. Ing. Arch. Diploma, University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Nichole Pinkard
Dr. Nichole Pinkard is a senior research associate (Assistant Professor) at the University of Chicago's Center for Urban School Improvement (USI), where she serves as director of technology for the center and as USI director of the Information Infrastructure System (IIS) project. Dr. Pinkard plays a leading role in USI's engagement in the ongoing process of researching problems around the integration of advanced technology systems into urban schools. As lead designer of the center's IIS project, she is leading the design and development of a knowledge management system that will better equip urban schools to provide ambitious intellectual work for all students. Dr. Pinkard's research interests focus on the development of visualizations to support teacher analysis of practice and student learning, the cultural context of learning and literacy, issues surrounding urban education and the relationship between gender and technology, and understanding how culture influences the design and use of learning environments by examining how designers' design decisions constrain and/or afford users' actions.

Amit Pitaru
Amit Pitaru is a researcher and designer in the field of Assistive Technology and Universal Design. Amit's work examines the manner in which current technologies may augment one's ability to learn and communicate. Based on a project he originated at New York University, Amit has been conducting research with Henry Viscardi School in Long Island, which caters to over two hundred children with disabilities. There he designed hardware and software tools that allow children with various disabilities to better communicate and engage in normal childhood activities of play and social engagement. His designs are currently in daily use by occupational therapists during school therapy sessions as well as independently by the students at home. He is currently working with industry leaders on cost-effective methods for integrating his findings into everyday products such as software, toys and appliances, thus making them intrinsically inclusive for a wider population, comprising of individuals with special needs, accident victims and the elderly population.

Loretta Wolozin
Loretta Wolozin, educator, designer, and hockey mom, teaches and coordinates the Research and Writing curriculum for the MFA Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. Long ago, when there were no jobs for teachers, she put her Teacher's Credential and English Literature Master's to work as Education Editor for twenty-five plus years at Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company (Boston). She built the K-12 Teacher Education list, collaborating closely with authors on print and media publications, from acquisitions through production. Many night classes at the Boston Architectural Center (BAC) led to a return to graduate school and receipt of the MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons (2002). Her article, Look - Duck Feet: Kinderboard on Kindertable Goes to Classrooms, in TIES: The Online Magazine of Design and Technology Education, www.tiesmagazine.org/archives/dec_2002/ describes her experience as design researcher and participant testing a novel, table top installation prototype in two New Jersey public elementary schools. Loretta is now embarked on an almost wholly new learning experience as guardian of her 13-year-old grandson - avid hockey player and media multi-tasker. Will she ever learn? Top