G4LI at GDC 2010: the Games for Learning Institute's research
The Games for Learning Institute (G4LI) was a university alliance studying how to design educational games that are fun and effective. It presented an update at the 2010 Serious Games Summit.
Updated
What the Games for Learning Institute was
The Games for Learning Institute, known as G4LI, is a research alliance built around one question: what makes educational games both fun and effective? It brought together 14 game design and education faculty from 8 universities, with New York University at the center and funding from Microsoft Research and a consortium of universities. The target group was middle school students, and the subject areas were math and science. A Teachers College, Columbia University page lists the partners as NYU, Columbia, CUNY, Dartmouth, Parsons, Polytechnic University at NYU and Rochester Institute of Technology, with Teachers College itself.
Its stated aim was to produce research-based design principles for educational games, so that game-based learning rests on evidence and not on enthusiasm alone. The same page says the institute was funded for three years.
The Game Developers Conference 2010 Serious Games Summit scheduled a session on the alliance titled "The Games for Learning Institute: Research on Design Patterns for Effective Educational Games". Jan L. Plass, associate professor and co-director of G4LI at NYU, spoke with Ken Perlin, an NYU professor, and John Nordlinger, a senior research program manager at Microsoft Research.
What the session covered
The talk gave an update on the collaborators and the research agenda, presented educational games developed by G4LI and described how the team evaluated them in middle school classrooms. The researchers had built an instrumented game design architecture that tracks users in detail. They measured fun and engagement with a mix of biometric and behavioral data, and they used methods that assess learning outcomes and learning strategies inside the game itself.
The listed takeaways were the shared research approach across the 14 members, the use of data from user logs, biometrics and user reports, the instrumented architecture and a summary of results to date.
A companion essay on bringing game-based learning to scale made a point about money. Learning games usually cost far less than entertainment titles: typically no more than $5 million and most often under $1 million. It cited Noah Falstein's "Serious Game Production" talk, in which cost tiers run from about $5,000 for a simple 2D brain-teaser like Happy Neuron, through about $200,000 for Freedom Fighter 56 and about $2 million for Re-Mission, to about $10 million for Gears of War.
What is true today
G4LI is documented in conference material and university pages, but its present activity is not confirmed here. The Teachers College page describes a three-year funded effort, and no current website run by the institute was found. Because the institute is a research group and not a single game, the games directory has no entry for it.
The cost tiers above come from a 2010 talk and describe that year's prices, not current ones.
Questions about G4LI at GDC 2010
What was the Games for Learning Institute?
It was a research alliance of 14 faculty from 8 universities, co-directed from NYU with funding from Microsoft Research and a university consortium. It studied design patterns for educational games in middle school math and science.
Who presented the G4LI session at GDC 2010?
Jan L. Plass and Ken Perlin of NYU presented it with John Nordlinger of Microsoft Research. Plass was co-director of G4LI.
Is G4LI still active?
Its present activity is not confirmed. A Teachers College page describes it as a three-year funded effort, and no current institute website was found.