Selene Videogame Design Session Gets High Marks
Wed May 2 2007
Educators got a sneak preview of the design and research of Selene, an educational videogame at an April 24 workshop sponsored by NASA Langley Research Center and Virginia Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation Center at Old Dominion University.Dr. Debbie Denise Reese, senior educational researcher at the Center for Educational Technologies®, led participants through the design and research involved in the new videogame the center and the NASA-sponsored Classroom of the Future housed there are helping to create.Selene, a casual game about lunar science, is designed to help players construct viable, robust, and coherent knowledge about our solar system's fundamental the geological processes. It is a collaborative effort by the Classroom of the Future™; the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; and the University of Florida's Digital Worlds Institute. The game will be tested beginning this month when the Classroom of the Future will conduct a research project for NASA into the effectiveness of videogames as learning tools.Thom Pinelli of Langley Research Center, who helped organize the session, said, "The feedback we received from the attendees was overwhelmingly positive. The teachers gave Selene extremely high marks. Several of them commented that Selene possesses many of the characteristics and features they would find essential to successfully implement this product in the classroom."
