Dive Brief:
- A new national report from Project Tomorrow, "From Print to Pixel: The role of videos, games, animations and simulations within K-12 education," says the use of game-based environments and online apps in American classrooms has doubled in the last six years.
- As of 2010, 23% of teachers said they used games and 47% said they used online videos, while in 2015 48% reported using games and 68% used online videos.
- At the same time, nearly half (47%) of district administrators reported having no game-based learning as well as no plans to incorporate any.
Dive Insight:
Game-based learning may continue growing in popularity in part due to rules set forth by the U.S. Department of Education, which mandates that Open Educational Resources (OER) must be free and modifiable, which can be applicable to certain applications and platforms. Educational game designers stand to lose profits from the government’s #GoOpen campaign, since going open-source is the antithesis of proprietary software.
Last November, the online magazine Games and Learning reported that “some worry that a new flood of teaching content free to use may make the already difficult world of selling new and high-end learning games to schools that much harder,” asking the pertinent question: "In a world where there are entire databases of free tools, why pay for a digital game?" At the same time, the OER trend has been slow to catch on, largely because of a lack of guidance around which resources are appropriate and effective.