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The MacArthur Foundation has decided to contribute $1.1 million to a new public school in New York for 6-12th graders. The curriculum for the entire school will surround designing video games. The idea is that children have "gaming literacy", or in other words, teaching kids about dynamic systems.
According to Katie Salen, the Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play, who has been teaching game design to children:
...Today, it's not so much about knowing the exact content on page 309, but it's understanding how the content on page 309 might be connected to content on page 500, which then may be impacted by something you find elsewhere on the Web.
Basically, it's a way to teach children how to think about those big picture problems. The example given by NPR is the complex situation of how driving your car eventually affects greenhouse gases, which in turn affects the animals in the ice caps, like polar bears. The lesson here is to see the connection between a car and the polar bear.
I know, you're saying, "Blah, blah, blah... How come public school kids get to learn game design when I had to learn how to read by watching the Electric Company?!"
Proposed Video-Game School Gets $1.1 Million Boost [NPR via Next-Gen]
