{"id":3636,"date":"2016-09-21T10:43:15","date_gmt":"2016-09-21T15:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/for-wisconsin\/?post_type=campus_story&p=3636"},"modified":"2016-09-21T10:43:15","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T15:43:15","slug":"uw-madison-spinoff-releases-latest-educational-game-aimed-at-teaching-fractions","status":"publish","type":"campus_story","link":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/story\/uw-madison-spinoff-releases-latest-educational-game-aimed-at-teaching-fractions\/","title":{"rendered":"UW-Madison spinoff releases latest educational game \u2013 aimed at teaching fractions"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Art<\/a>
Art Director Alexander Cooney creates environments for an upcoming Filament game. Photo by David Tenenbaum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A Madison maker of educational games has just published Diffission, a visual game to teach fractions to middle schoolers without the pain of the traditional \u201cskill and drill.\u201d<\/p>\n

The software will generate up to one billion shapes, and users will have to build fractions from them, says\u00a0Filament Games<\/a>\u00a0CEO Dan White. \u201cIt\u2019s very tactile, and imparts a conceptual understanding of fractions that\u2019s very difficult to convey using traditional numerical methods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diffission joins 13 other games in Filament\u2019s \u201clibrary.\u201d The company sells individual games on the web, but its marketing strategy focuses on licensing the library of games to schools or school districts.<\/p>\n

In August 2015, the Sun Prairie school district bought a district-wide license for all students.<\/p>\n

White and co-founders Alex Stone and Daniel Norton were already experienced gamers in 2007, when they began work on an ocean science game at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe player took on the role of a researcher on an alien planet, trying to understand the ecosystem,\u201d White says. \u201cWe presented the game at a conference, and a member of the audience from the\u00a0Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation\u00a0<\/a>approached us about plans to build a curriculum on ocean science.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kauffman\u2019s $1 million grant \u201callowed us to hire our first staff and figure out how to be a real company,\u201d White says. Filament now has 40 full-time employees and offices on West Washington Ave. in Madison.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A screenshot from Diffission, a new game from Filament Games in Madison, asks players to create the fraction 1\/2 from the on-screen elements. Image: Filament Games<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The game, called Resilient Planet, \u201callows you to dive into a world that you know nothing about,\u201d White says. \u201cYou get to explore, to engage in inquiry and see what happens. The students drive the experience and own the outcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Filament has three business lines: developing and publishing its own games, distributing games made by others, and doing contract work for companies or organizations.<\/p>\n

One of Filament\u2019s steadiest clients is\u00a0iCivics<\/a>, an organization founded by Sandra Day O\u2019Connor after she retired from the Supreme Court. The series of 21 iCivics games, \u201cis used in 50 states by 80,000 to 90,000 registered teachers and has been played at least 33 million times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using the games, \u201cstudents learn through experimentation and low stakes failure, and dare I say even enjoy themselves in the process,\u201d White says.<\/p>\n

Filament emerged with UW\u2013Madison\u2019s games-for-learning research program that\u2019s now called Games+Learning+Society, says the program\u2019s director, Kurt Squire. \u201cFilament was our first \u2018in house\u2019 development team, when we were housed at UW-System\u2019s Academic ADL Co-Lab, and Dan White graduated from our program.<\/p>\n

Squire and Constance Steinkuehler, co-director of Games+Learning+Society, will be leaving UW\u2013Madison for the University of California at the end of this year.<\/p>\n

Many of Filament\u2019s employees were educated at UW\u2013Madison and UW-Whitewater. White has a master\u2019s in curriculum and instruction from UW\u2013Madison, while Stone has a BS in computer science. Norton is creative director.<\/p>\n

White describes the job of educational game designer as serving as \u201cthe conduit between the subject-matter expert and the player. Often, the less the designer knows about the subject at the outset, the better, because they learn how to teach it in the process of teaching themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some subjects are more conducive to game play than others, White says. Science, with its systems, including the solar system and the ocean ecosystem, are typically good subjects. Less suitable material includes \u201cflat content like multiplication tables. We can make candy-coated flash cards, but that\u2019s a nuclear powered flyswatter; paper flash cards work fine,\u201d White says.<\/p>\n

Marketing a technology associated with fun to the serious business of education can be challenging, White agrees, but once adoption begins, teacher anecdotes are encouraging, especially concerning hard-to-reach students.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not uncommon for teachers to remark with astonishment at the degree to which good learning games can transform disengaged students into motivated students who collaborate with their peers, talk about the material after class or do research of their own volition,\u201d White says.<\/p>\n

\u201cGames are valuable because they map well to modern theories of learning,\u201d says Squire. \u201cThey immerse players in problem-solving experiences in which they can learn in the context of doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

As games gain a foothold in schools, Squire adds, \u201cthe real challenge is creating good ones that are well integrated with curricula and help improve instruction by providing teachers, students and parents better data about learning. Filament is absolutely at the forefront in all of these areas, and is a real credit to the university, region and community.\u201d<\/p>\n

White forecasts the increasing acceptance of games. \u201cIn the beginning, we spent a lot of breath talking about why game-based learning is a good idea. We don\u2019t have to do that so much anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

By\u00a0David Tenenbaum<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Madison maker of educational games has just published Diffission, a visual game to teach fractions to middle schoolers without the pain of the traditional \u201cskill and drill.\u201d The software will generate up to one billion shapes, and users will have to build fractions from them, says\u00a0Filament Games\u00a0CEO Dan White. \u201cIt\u2019s very tactile, and imparts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":3640,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","institution":[103],"story_category":[],"class_list":["post-3636","campus_story","type-campus_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","institution-uw-madison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story\/3636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/campus_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/campus_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3636"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"institution","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/institution?post=3636"},{"taxonomy":"story_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wisconsin.edu\/all-in-wisconsin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/story_category?post=3636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}