Games and Learning

LearnBIG catalogs online learning resources. We scour the internet to index and organize the most popular education tools. Our database contains more than 16,000 learning resources from over 1,500 content producers. We collect resources aimed at learners of any age and ability, from simple matching games for toddlers to massive open online courses (MOOCs) on quantum physics. Our database consists of online games, videos, courses, books and simulations for teaching and learning any subject you can imagine.

 Building the Database

To determine what makes it into our database, we look for evidence of effort and quality to give our users a great experience. We do not include random blog posts on educational topics nor do we parse through web forums. We avoid online resources that resemble traditional classroom experiences, like simple online quizzes and printable worksheets. We focus our time and energy collecting learning resources made by people who took the time and energy to create great experiences with modern technology.

Resources we decide to index must be easily accessible by any individual. Numerous web services and software packages are marketed solely to schools or school districts for bulk purchasing. If it is virtually impossible for the average parent or student to access a given resource, we don’t catalog it.

Building our database took months of concerted effort and continues to this day. Early on, the entire LearnBIG team worked together to identify as many resources as we could from as many sources as possible. We spent months clicking through “best of” lists, articles, aggregators, app store listings and any other appropriate links we could find. We hired a dozen interns over the summer to help us identify and gather information about online resources, which led to an initial database of 12,000 or so resources. Since launch, we have added an additional 4,000 resources as we continue to stay up-to-date and patch holes in our catalog. LearnBIG grows by hundreds of resources every week.

 The State of the Digital Educational Union

With that in mind, I argue that LearnBIG represents a wide enough swath of the learning landscape that we can comfortably draw conclusions about the state of online educational games. We pay special attention to games, and for good reason. Three of us in the office have actively been involved in creating, distributing and using educational games (this author included). We love games and cannot help but agree that they serve a unique role in education.

In the graphs and analysis below, I investigate LearnBIG’s index of educational games.

Figure 1 – Games make up 13% of the LearnBIG library. “Other” resources include textbooks,
simulations, audio clips, lessons, books and images.

Figure 2 – 18% of the resources our users pick are games.

Figure 1 shows that games are the second most common resource on LearnBIG. While they represent 13% of our total resources, figure 2 shows that 18% of our total launches are games, meaning that 18% of what people decide to try on LearnBIG are games. Games are being launched disproportionately more than their share of all resources, indicating a healthy demand for games.

Figure 3 – Number of games by subject. General games, most often aimed at younger children, make up the
largest portion of games. “Other” subjects are detailed in figure 4.

Figure 4 – Breaking down the games by subject in the “Other” category from figure 3.

With figure 3, we see a huge number of games in the general category, most of which are mobile apps aimed at young children. As figure 4 shows, technology and engineering games surprisingly take up a small enough market share that they fall into the “Other” category, with only 45 games.

Figure 5 – Number of games by grade. Note the trend towards games aimed at younger children.

Figure 6 – Number of games by platform. Here we see that the overwhelming majority of games are
made for iOS or web browsers.

Figures 5 and 6 demonstrate clear trends towards games aimed at younger children and consumed through web browsers or iOS devices.

We have identified strong interest in learning games in all aspects of LearnBIG’s ecosystem, from comparing our database and user behavior to analysis of popular search terms (a discussion for another time). While the early childhood educational game market receives the most attention, our database evidences a nice spread in terms of age level and content for educational games as a whole.

Looking at the top content producers of educational games on LearnBIG in table 1, we see that only four producers have more than 50 resources.

Table 1 – Top 20 Content Producers

*Includes many nearly identical resources for different math operations (e.g. addition and subtraction versions of the same game).

**Most iCivics games were created by Filament Games

The educational games market is a free-for-all, with no one developer dominating or market share saturated. Our statistics show that there is healthy room for expansion and growth for games aimed at all grade levels and in all subjects. At LearnBIG, we look forward to tracking and sharing the evolution of the educational games marketplace.