Studies highlight the benefits of playing educational video games, but a new partnership seeks to understand whether the act of designing video games boosts students’ computational thinking and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills.
Collaborating with Microsoft and the Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Foundation, education researchers at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, have created the curriculum and tools to make the video game design program Microsoft Kodu — a computer language that lets children create and program their own games — more accessible in K-12 classrooms.
Called Studio K, the instructional toolkit makes it easier to teach students how to design video games and assess whether the activity affects their abilities to solve problems with computers.
Read more: UW-Madison partnership creates educational game development tools (June 13, 2012).