MIT STEP

STEP Training

MIT STEP offers a teacher licensing program that can be done entirely at MIT or in conjunction with courses at Wellesley College. This program licenses students to teach mathematics or science in grades 5-12. The Scheller Teacher Education Program, offered through the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, prepares MIT students to become teachers who are competent to teach in their field, willing to challenge established norms, able to bridge the boundaries among disciplines, and eager to help students develop the desire to question and explore. Click here for more info on STEP and here for more info on classes.

For Educators

STEP is actively engaged in many research and development projects, designing and testing new learning technologies for use in formal and informal education. While some projects are in limited testing with partners, others are freely available for all to try and to use (some complete with curriculum and assessment). Find out more about these projects on the projects page.

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Palmagotchi

Palmagotchi combines the ideas of virtual pets (such as the popular Tamagotchi toy) and the evolutionary story of Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands. Players maintain families of birds and islands of flowers. They monitor and feed birds in order to keep them alive. They also mate their birds with other players’ birds in order to get offspring with desirable traits that maximize their chances of surviving various hazards in the game.

MITAR Games

The MIT Teacher Education Program, in conjunction with The Education Arcade, has been working on creating "Augmented Reality" simulations to engage people in simulation games that combine real world experiences with additional information supplied to them by handheld computers. The first of these games, Environmental Detectives (ED), is an outdoor game in which players using GPS guided handheld computers try to uncover the source of a toxic spill by interviewing virtual characters and conducting large scale simulated environmental measurements and analyzing data. This game has been run at three sites, including MIT, a nearby nature center, and a local high school. Early research has shown that this mode of learning is successful in engaging university and secondary school students in large scale environmental engineering studies, and providing an authentic mode of scientific investigation.

StarLogo TNG

Version 1.5. Download it here

Curriculum Materials HERE

StarLogo TNG is The Next Generation of StarLogo modeling and simulation software. While this version holds true to the premise of StarLogo as a tool to create and understand simulations of complex systems, it also brings with it several advances - 3D graphics and sound, a blocks-based programming interface, and keyboard input - that make it a great tool for programming educational video games.

Through TNG we hope to:

Lower the barrier to entry for programming with a graphical interface where language elements are represented by colored blocks that fit together like puzzle pieces.
Entice more young people into programming through tools that facilitate making games.
Use 3D graphics to make more compelling and rich games and simulation models.

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The Radix Endeavor

The Radix Endeavor is a multiplayer online game for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) learning in high school.

The game is funded by the Gates Foundation, and under development at the MIT Education Arcade in collaboration with Filament Games. The initial phase will cover topics in biology, algebra, geometry, probability, and statistics, providing students with a collaborative, social experience in a systems-based game world where they can explore how the world works and discover important scientific concepts. The project began in late 2011 and will be released in a public pilot phase in the fall of 2013.

To learn more about the project and how you can get involved, complete the form to receive Radix Updates.
To keep abreast of the game design and development process, check out the Radix Design Blog!
To share this project with other teachers you know, point them to radixendeavor.org or download the Radix Overview PDF.

Ubiquitous Games

The Ubiquitous Games label consists of several different projects: games such as Weatherlings, the first game created under this particular platform, as well as the UbiqBio project, which features four games that teach various topics in high school intro biology classes.

Vanished

Vanished is a "curated game," a format derived from alternate reality games (ARGs) for museums, being developed by Education Arcade for the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C., with NSF funding. The game ran from April 4 through May 22 2011, and targeted middle school age kids in informal settings like afterschool programs.