iCue

Today’s youth, especially high school students, navigate a rich, diverse, and increasingly complicated mediascape. They often do so with ease, developing skills that extend literacy, synthesis and other traditional school skills. There are challenges however – despite an unprecedented 24-hour flow of news and information, teens typically have little awareness of or regard for news and current events; students have difficulty determining the quality of online sources; frequent use of shorthand writing styles for text or instant messaging causes some students problems when later asked to write well-developed essays.

Palmagotchi

A Screen from 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.

Kids Survey Network

In 2008, Education Arcade was awarded a sub-contract under TERC, Inc., with NSF funding, to develop three multi-player flash games and a series of video tutorials that teaches basic survey-making skills, concepts, and vocabulary to middle school age adolescents. These games and videos are to be part of a larger afterschool curriculum being developed by TERC, Inc., a non-profit organization that specializes in K-12 science and math educational products. KSN seeks to address a lack of focus and quality curriculum materials in the middle school on statistics and data analysis.