Games and Learning

The National Science Foundation has awarded GamesandLearning, Inc. one of its America’s Seed Fund grants to develop and test a new platform for identifying and delivering quality learning games to educators.

That is the first step of a new company that aims to tackle the nagging problem of distribution that has plague developers and funders of game-based learning products.

The new grant also marks the unveiling of the company, one that from the name to the logo has clear ties to this site and the nonprofit we started to help improve the entire GBL community.

The new company announced its plans this week in a news release.

“Parents and teachers crave outstanding products and the market has never produced more evidence-based, engaging options. But without a solution to abysmal distribution, great content will never reach a wide audience of kids,” said Michelle Miller, CEO of Games and Learning, Inc.

And so, as editor of GamesandLearning.org, I wanted to take a minute and explain the relationship between the .org and the .co.

Some 6 years ago this site launched based on work done at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The work had targeted what might help “move the needle” for game-based learning. Through interviews with developers, funders and educators the idea emerged to create an unbiased information source for the space. One that tried to outline effective development, marketing and research methods to help game makers create more quality digital learning tools and bring them to market.

Over the next several years we published hundreds of pieces, from deciphering learning research to exploring the business models of different game makers.

With founding support from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Games and Learning became an independent nonprofit organization in 2016. The original team (including myself and former managing director of the Center, Michelle Miller) continued to report on business, research and technical developments and we published original research as well as additional news stories.

Throughout all this work, I kept coming across a single issue that seemed to be intractable – developers of quality games were lost in the chaos of the App Store and the Android marketplace. The problem of findability and distribution remained.

So, as the news site continued its work, Miller, with the help of a board of directors that included myself, created a new company that would try to answer that challenge.

The nonprofit that runs this site entered into an arrangement with the new corporation to use the name and logo in exchange for a small profit-sharing on the new company and a share of the company’s stock.

This company is a separate entity from the nonprofit and this website, but we both share a mission to improve the quality of learning games accessible to students, parents and teachers and to help make making such games a profitable venture for developers.

This new project will, I am sure, show up on this site from time to time and we will be clear to outline our connection, but I want to assure you that no part of the corporate effort will dictate or affect this website’s mission to be an unbiased arbiter of the games and learning space.

These two projects remain linked, the corporate entity having grown out of what we have learned and told you on this website. I serve on the board of the corporate entity and Miller, the CEO of GamesandLearning.co, serves on the board of the nonprofit that runs this effort.

Our hope is that the corporate platform will help quality games find audience and revenue in homes and schools across the country and that corporate success will help supplement the effort to report on how to make and market the best learning games possible.