Monday, September 8, 2014

NumberShire Goes to the White House

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 GamesSokikomBreakaway Games, Institute of PlayTeachleyGlassLabElectric FunstuffAttainment CompanyiCivics 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). 

The view from our meeting room

The buck stopped here

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