Embodied learning situations provide students with opportunities to learn from the interaction of their physical bodies within an environment of information.  Students develop an experiential knowledge that involves senses, perceptions, and mind-body actions and reactions. GameDesk looks to build curriculum, teaching methods, and technology to bring the body back into educational theory and practice.

For example, as students move across a projected floor space and see their movement tracked and plotted along a graph, they begin to “feel” velocity and whether it is constant or not. This results in the student developing a relationship with the concept and the way science and math represent it numerically and symbolically.

As part of this new initiative GameDesk has partnered with researchers at Arizona State University who have developed an interactive mixed reality learning environment, the Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab [SMALLab]. SMALLab supports situated and embodied learning by empowering the physical body to function as an expressive interface. Within SMALLab, students use a set of “glowballs” and peripherals to interact in real time with each other and with a large projected environment through full body 3D movements and gestures.

GameDesk recently ran several learning sessions through SMALLab at the School for Global Studies in Los Angeles, California covering aspects of chemistry, physics, and water ecologies.

GameDesk will develop, in partnership with SMALLab, 6th grade curriculum modules to launch in the new GameDesk charter school.