It seems that nothing can stop the growth of games that teach, train, and promote social change.  On Thursday, February 11, 2010, GameDesk Executive Director, Lucien Vattel joined a panel of industry insiders from Alelo, Disney Learning, and Enspire Learning, to discuss the current state of the serious games sector.  The panel discussed the use of the “zone of proximal development” as a key framework for designing curriculum, models for serious game production processes, and ensuring the survival of “fun” in serious games.  The healthy and challenging exchange examined several topics GameDesk seeks to address in the coming months.

The most recent issue of George Lucas’s Edutopia includes a great article on GameDesk.

“Having more financial resources will enable us one day to take this program to a national audience,” says Vattel. “But my general rule is, the one thing that matters most is the individual teacher. You do need support from the administration. You do need technical tools. But if you don’t have a teacher who believes in this zany idea — that you can embed game-making technology into the curriculum no matter what the subject — then it won’t work.”

Check out the entire article here.

GameDesk takes a core curriculum and transforms it into a series of engaging game tools that students can use to create exciting and fun games.  In a physics class, for example, an equation on collision is traditionally introduced by the teacher in the form of lecture, where students complete exercises, homework, and are tested in exam form.

In GameDesk, they make CAR CRASH DERBY! learning the collision equation as a game-tool to build the game.  The goal isn’t to force the subject on the students, but rather to have the students want to learn them as a way to build fun games.

More on GameDesk methodology here.

It’s a new school year at Crenshaw High School and GameDesk is rolling out two pilots – a revised math gaming course and a new game art course will launch in mid September.  Both courses will run simultaneously and collaborate with one another to complete assignments and game projects.

GameDesk presents another edition of the Educators Game Lab for groups of Los Angeles high school teachers from a variety of subject areas.  Teachers collaborated with designers, programmers, and curriculum developers from the University of Southern California to train in and co-develop new GameDesk curriculum.  Teachers learned game design and programming and co-designed new game-based pedagogy that is at the heart of the GameDesk mission.