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CONTACT |
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Dr. William Watson
Beering Hall Room 3122
100 N University Street
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2098
765-494-9735
brwatson@purdue.edu
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ABOUT |
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The Purdue Center for Serious Games and Learning in Virtual Environments is housed in the College of Education at Purdue in Beering Hall room 3292. The center was established with the support of the Discovery Learning Center, the Office of the Vice-president of Research and the College of Education. The “Serious Games Center” seeks to encourage collaboration and establish a foundation for research at Purdue on serious games and virtual environments for learning, support innovative instructional practices, and establish a framework for developing and implementing engaging and innovative instruction for both K-12 and higher education classrooms.
The center includes a lab for utilizing, designing, developing, and evaluating serious games and virtual environments. Usability software allows for the full capturing of user interactions within these environments.
Today’s students, identified as the Gamer Generation (Beck & Wade, 2004) or as Digital Natives (Prensky, 2006), crave and expect engagement and interactivity. More and more, video games are becoming the popular medium with which these students engage. The increasing popularity of video games and the need for today’s students to be engaged with interactive instruction prompted the Federation of American Scientists (2006) to recently declare that video games can redefine education and call for additional research. In addition to video games for learning or “serious games”, the potential of immersive, digital, 3D environments for promoting engagement and collaboration is also being recognized. Multi-user virtual environment s(MUVEs) are becoming more and more mainstream as companies such as CNN, IBM, the NBA, as well as many colleges and universities, set up virtual representations of their organizations online. The MUVE Second Life is being used to hold conferences, meetings, job interviews and has over 9.6 million registered users, with Gartner Inc. estimating that by 2011, over 80 percent of active Internet users and major companies will have a virtual world presence online (Kitchen, 2007).
Center Mission Statement
To provide support for implementing, designing and developing serious games and virtual environments for learning; to encourage collaboration across Purdue and with K-12 schools; and, to establish a foundation for securing funding and conducting research at Purdue on the use of serious games and virtual learning environments in education.
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