I'm incredibly honored and excited to have represented Thought Cycle in an Education Games Workshop at the White House this past
week. It was an amazing assemblage of
some of the most active and accomplished companies in the Educational Gaming
space including BrainPOP, Filament Games, Sokikom, Breakaway Games, Institute of Play, Teachley, GlassLab, Electric Funstuff, Attainment Company, iCivics and many more.
Mark DeLoura from the White House Office of Science and Technology
Policy and Russell Shilling, Executive Director for STEM Initiatives at U.S.
Department of Education,
brought us together to brainstorm strategies and opportunities for expanding the
STEM gaming eco-system.
On a creative
level, we discussed encouraging development of STEM/STEAM videogames through
nationwide competitions sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative. Competitions
would seek to get students and educators involved in the selection of promising
games while creating a pool of resources and networks of support for developers
to expand their prototypes into high quality games that can be widely
distributed.
On a player level, the group explored creating a National
STEM Gaming Competition to engage students nationwide to solve a billion STEM
problems in-game through competition and collaboration.
Everyone left energized and inspired to keep the discussion
going and start planning for the hard work ahead to make these initiatives
happen in the next year. On a personal, level it was really special for me to participate
in the group with all the great folks from the Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences cohort Thought Cycle has
been a part of for the past several years. All of the companies in the group are incredibly supportive of each other
and full of great people who are friends as well as colleagues.
The only thing that could have made the day any better was
if the Truman Bowling Alley in the basement had been open. It wasn't. I went to
the basement and checked (Shhh).
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| The view from our meeting room |
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| The buck stopped here |
