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Serious Games, Meaningful Games


Via: Futurelab - Innovation in Education

Futurelab's Call for ideas will officially be announced in a few weeks and ideas can be submitted throughout September.

This year Futurelab is asking for ideas that fit two themes.

The first theme they’re particularly interested in is meaningful games. These are games that aim to achieve serious social results by enabling learners to engage with important issues such as learning, democracy, environment and sustainability, their local community etc etc.

They’re games that afford the opportunity to explore and interact with important topics that can be difficult to engage with – topics that are important personally, locally or nationally and internationally.

Futurelab is looking for new forms of meaningful games to engage players as learners, and learners as players. They're looking for new, exciting ideas for games that can support learners in developing their understanding and actions within these important issues.


The second theme the’re particularly interested in is mobile games.

These are games that are primarily developed for use while learners are on the move or interacting with the places, objects or people around them.

These games can make use of mobile devices (phones, mobile consoles etc) but also fixed artifacts.

Mobile Games for Learning can provide opportunities to learn through interaction with ‘real’ spaces, histories, maps, and people in public and outdoor spaces that are not traditionally seen as sites of learning.

There are opportunities to explore how Mobile Games for Learning could promote healthy lifestyles and well being as well as offer more approaches to learning that include learners who do not always succeed in mainstream education.

Futurelab's aim is to develop the best idea further so that it can be showcased, perhaps modelled in a way that lets people try it out, or that possibly helps prepare it for a larger stage of development.

Ideas are sought from absolutely anyone in the UK. Whatever your background is, whether you are applying as an individual, as a teacher or learner, as a developer, as a school or university, or as a company, Futurelab welcomes all idea submissions.

If selected by the expert panel, Futurelab will either help you develop it, or support the idea and help it find funding via its network.