Games and Learning

This week marks the end of our first full year of coverage of the learning games industry.

To mark the anniversary we will have a few special features and interactive efforts to reflect on a year of stories and look at where research and media have been and how learning games are increasingly a global conversation.

We start with a slightly inwardly focused moment…

When we developed gamesandlearning.org as a niche news service aimed at game developers interested in developing learning games and foundations and investors who support that work, we had a very American-centric view — look at Common Core and its impact on gaming, explore the latest science from researchers at American universities and look at the the marketplaces like the App Store and Google Play.

And then we started seeing who was coming to the site and realized we needed to broaden our focus. Twitter helped fuel the speculation, especially in terms of global reach, as we receive tweets from countries all over the world; Egypt, Italy, Turkey, and Scotland, to name a few. Fortunately, Google Analytics and the like can paint a clearer picture of who is looking at our material, when, and from where.

It’s true just over 50 percent of our visitors hail from the U.S., but set that group aside for a moment and here is a snapshot of where the other half of our audience comes from:

And even once you look here in the U.S., we see that learning games — or at least the interest in them — is not a coastal affair limited to New York and California.

Here is where people have come from in the U.S.:

The takeaway? Games and learning is not an American story, but a global one. In fact, later this week we’ll hear from Jordan Shapiro who has been talking with educational leaders from Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa about the use of games to teach.