Two tech companies make big announcements on the same day for something with the same name? Video game maker Electronic Arts, along with the Entertainment Software Association and Institute of Play, introduced GLASS, which has nothing to do (yet) with donning a pair of specs embedded with a computer. With backing from the Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, this GLASS is what might be considered every teenage boys’ dream job: a video game testing center. Before all you gangly, awkward, modulating-voiced dudes spend your paper route money on a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley to go hunting for the GLASS Lab, know this: it’s a testing center for games that help you learn stuff. You know, like school. And GLASS is actually an acronym for Games Learning and Assesment (I guess GLA Lab didn’t sound quite right).
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The project will have two primary goals: building next-generation educational games, and creating tools to take existing games, potentially such as EA’s upcoming “SimCity,” and measure what students learn from them.
Imagine a child playing the popular city-building game, and they’re presented with a problem: the ocean’s become too polluted, and they need to fix it. The student can begin fiddling with different things, such as how many trash collectors there are.
OK so you’re probably not going to get to play first-person shooter games or drive around a virtual racetrack, but you might get to play SimCity all day? Not bad. And what else are you going to do this summer?
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