Toolbox

At the Institute of Play, we help others gain fluency in the effective use of digital media and games for learning. We command a rich and varied toolbox that includes a range of projects and tools that support our design and research.

Quest to Learn
Quest to Learn (Q2L), is a proposed 6th-12th grade small school set to open in Fall 2009. Q2L is being created in collaboration with New Visions for Public Schools, and will use digital media and games as a foundation for learning.

Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab
The Institute of Play, in collaboration with Arizona State University's K-12 Embodied Media and Learning group, has been developing games and learning scenarios in the Situated Multimedia Art Learning Lab (SMALLab). A mixed-reality learning environment where physical motions trigger rich media elements, SMALLab was developed by ASU's David Birchfield.

Summer Teacher Institute (2008)
The 2008 Summer Teachers' Institute was a month-long curriculum development workshop for a small group of 6th and 7th grade teachers. During the workshop, the teachers collaborated with the Institute of Play's curriculum specialists and game designers to create games, curricular components and toolkits.

Gamestar Mechanic Strategy Guide
Gamestar Mechanic is an online multiplayer game developed by Gamelab and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The Strategy Guide, being developed by the Institute of Play, is a learning resource through which to study the game's principle concepts and its potential uses as an educational tool.

Pilots & Toolkits
As part of our development process we are working with several New Visions schools to pilot curriculum along three technology strands: game design, mobile media, and virtual environments. The goal of these pilots is to discover strategies for integrating game-like learning into a standards-based framework and to build curriculum that can be used both in Quest to Learn and in other schools without a dedicated gaming thematic. The focus of these pilots is to develop and test curriculum, as well as to begin to develop models for teacher training, teacher recruitment, and professional development.

An additional focus is on supporting the design and implementation of a range of “toolkits” that allow players (students, teachers, and parents) to author game and play experiences of their own.

MiLK ( Mobile Informal Learning Kit) Curriculum Design
MiLK was developed by Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). The Institute of Play's role in this project has been to develop new gaming concepts for MiLK for play by both students and teachers. In addition, we have proposed and developed supplementary platforms and content, and prototyped, playtested, and documented our research findings for use in further iterations of the tool and the related curriculum.

Gamestar Mechanic Research
Gamestar Mechanic (G*M) is an online multiplayer game developed by Gamelab and funded by the MacArthur Foundation. For the past year, a small number of teachers and researchers have been conducting G*M Workshops. The workshops are designed to test the game’s potential to teach middle and high school students the basics of game design and systems thinking.

Game Bucket
Game Bucket, designed and developed by Institute of Play, is an interactive online tool that creates connections between games and educational standards. Currently in development, Game Bucket will be an essential resource for teachers interested in integrating games into their classrooms.

Game Frameworks
Part of our recent focus has been on developing materials to help teachers and others imagine ways of integrating games and game design materials into a range of spaces of learning. While the work is still in draft form, you can see some of the ideas here.
Uses of Games

Research
As a research-based games and learning group, we are constantly reading, writing and tinkering—we read papers, reports and articles to stay abreast of new findings, we write blogs to track our research and we tinker with apps, tools, games and curriculum that can be used at our proposed school Quest to Learn. Visit our Research Library for more information.

Internship and Volunteer Programs
We are always in need of dynamic and smart people of all ages to help the Institute keep everyone playing well together. If you would like to volunteer or intern, either in a design, technology, teaching, or research capacity, feel free to send a letter of inquiry to leah at instituteofplay.org If you are interested in our youth program, playForce, please contact chloe at instituteofplay.org