Games and Learning

Co.lab received some 60 applications from firms wanting to join the second cohort. Seven made the cut.

Barely a month after graduating the first companies to move through the four-month accelerator program, co.lab has announced seven new projects that will enter the process starting next month.

Co.lab, a partnership between the NewSchool Venture Fund and Zynga.org, received some 60 applications from small startups and established firms before settling on the next group.

“The seven startups we selected are among the most promising companies in this space and we are eager to see them refine, develop and scale their products during the coming months at co.lab,” said co.lab Executive Director Esteban Sosnik in a statement.

The second group of companies are:

• BrainQuake (www.brainquake.com) delivers personalized, adaptive mobile math apps on a proprietary platform with state-of-the-art performance dashboards and analytics.
• Kid Bunch (www.kidbunch.com) is an e-toy studio creating award-winning digital adventures, toys and interactive stories for the entire family.
• Kiko Labs (www.kikolabs.com) melds game design and cognitive neuroscience to create training programs that help children develop critical skills like attention and reasoning.
• Pixowl (www.pixowl.com) develops The Sandbox, a unique educative world-building game named one of Apple iTunes Best Games of 2012 & 2013, offering infinite creative possibilities in crafting, pixel art, chiptunes music, contraptions and much more.
• Timbuktu (www.timbuktu.me) creates mobile games that help children stay fit and healthy. Winner of Best Children’s Magazine of the Year at Digital Magazine Awards 2013.
• TinyTap (www.tinytap.it) is creating a simple platform that allows users to design personalized educational games and learn from thousands of games shared by the TinyTap community. Winner of Verizon’s Powerful Answers Award for first prize in education.
• CourseMaster (www.course-master.com) is dedicated to providing an easy to use application platform for online/offline education.

From Zynga’s perspective, co.lab is part of their effort to “find out where the most productive meeting points are between where learning games are and the pedagogy is and what a commercial game developer to bear on that and so part of the secret sauce of co.lab is having our product managers and our engineers and marketers and some of our creative folks coming across to do product advising and to be in the sandbox with actual edtech companies, startups and various different stages,” Ken Weber, Executive Director of Zynga.org, said recently at an event to kick off the launch of gamesandlearning.org.

The companies will co-locate in co.lab’s space at Zynga’s San Francisco headquarters for the program, which starts in April and runs through July.

The new group brings to 12 the number of products and firms that have been part of the accelerator and, as Sosnick said late last year, the hope is these organizations will serve as the start of a learning games community.

“We are really hoping to be a hub, a community of people who want to not just make great games, but also change the way children learn,” Sosnik said.