2010 Horizon Report K-12: game-based learning on the horizon

The 2010 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition is one volume in the Horizon Report series from the New Media Consortium (NMC). The series is the best-known product of the NMC's Horizon Project, a research effort begun in 2002 that identifies emerging technologies likely to affect teaching, learning, research or creative expression in education worldwide. The K-12 edition looks at the pre-college setting.

Every edition picks six technologies or practices and sorts them into three adoption horizons, each describing when the technology should reach mainstream use in schools over the next one to five years. Each volume also lays out the key trends and challenges that shape teaching and learning over the same period.

The second horizon, two to three years out, held two technologies the report called well established: game-based learning and mobiles. Both had entered popular culture, both had been shown to work as learning tools in a number of schools, and both were expected to see much broader use in pre-college education. For the 2010 edition, that put widespread adoption of game-based learning at roughly 2012 or 2013.

The report tied the speed-up in interest to two things: clear successes in military and industrial training, and new research into the cognitive benefits of play. It described game-based learning as an expansive category, running from paper-and-pencil word searches to massively multiplayer online and role-playing games. Educational games, it said, fall into three groups: non-digital games, digital games that are not collaborative, and collaborative digital games.

Digital examples named in the report include games on consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, IBM's Power Up, which runs through a special game client, and Whyville, which runs through a web interface. The report also argued that the three most recent cohorts of kids, those born in the early 1980s, early 1990s and early 2000s, grew up immersed in digital games, and that games are a natural way to reach them. Its view was that research and experience showed games can be applied very effectively in many learning contexts.

The NMC's old web address for the Horizon Project, nmc.org, now forwards to a search page in the EDUCAUSE library filtered to publications by the New Media Consortium. The report itself is therefore found through that library and not through a project site of its own.

Whyville, one of the games the report named, still has an official site that presents it as a virtual world for kids with free registration. Whether it runs on a current browser is not confirmed, so the games directory lists its status as not confirmed. The adoption forecast covered a window that has long passed, and it should be read as a 2010 expectation.