K20 game portal: serious games from the K20 Center
The K20 game portal is how the University of Oklahoma's K20 Center distributes its educational and training games, among them Mind Your Own Budget, Advance U and MACBETH. The center's games page now lists 15 titles, and schools request access.
Updated
What the K20 game portal distributes
The K20 Center for Educational and Community Renewal at the University of Oklahoma is a statewide education research and development center. It studies digital game-based learning and builds its own games, working from research and subject experts, then moving through months of development, prototypes and focus-group testing.
Distribution used to be a problem, because research grants paid for building the games but not for hosting them. A partnership with OneNet, which hosts a virtual server for the gaming software in its data center, opened the games to Oklahoma schools at no cost. The center offered 14 titles at that point.
Three games from the collection
Mind Your Own Budget teaches financial literacy through scenarios that run from moving into a first apartment to starting a business, with real-life complications such as emergency expenses and bankruptcy. Its Simple Saver scenario covers budgeting and savings, College Coed adds taxes and checkbook balancing, and College Grad brings in loans, debt, insurance and monthly payments. The game page says it complies with the Oklahoma Department of Education's Personal Financial Literacy Passport standards.
Advance U: The TALENT Machine introduces neuroplasticity and mindset theory. At a fictional academy a machine claims to measure natural talent and assign each student a job, and players learn about the brain's ability to change in order to prove it wrong.
MACBETH, short for Mitigating Analyst Cognitive Bias by Eliminating Task Heuristics, puts players in the role of an intelligence analyst who foils terrorist threats by managing resources and avoiding decision-making errors such as confirmation bias. The Air Force Research Laboratory commissioned it in support of IARPA, and in 2013 it took Best Serious Game in the business category and in the Adaptive Force Training special emphasis at the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge.
What is true today
The K20 Center's games page loads and lists 15 titles: Operation: ELECT, Get a Life, Mind Your Own Budget, AWARE, Functions of the Machine, Deadly Distribution, The Detective: Verona, The Detective: Bavaria, Potions!, two Advance U games, Paper Trail, Mission Prime, Perfect Strain and MACBETH. Each entry has a Request Games button, so access runs through a request, and the page does not state a price.
Some old game addresses changed. The old Advance U page shows a not-found message, and the Mind Your Own Budget page now sits under a different address.
Questions about the K20 game portal
What is the K20 game portal?
It is the University of Oklahoma K20 Center's route to its learning games. Schools and teachers request accounts and then play the games online.
Are the K20 games free?
The Oklahoma schools program offered the games at no cost. The current games page does not state a price and sends visitors to a Request Games button.
Which games does the K20 Center offer?
The games page lists 15, covering financial literacy, college and career awareness, statistics, calculus, biology, information literacy, ethics and cognitive bias.