Monument games

Or, where can I buy a copy of these games?

The epistemic games you can learn about on this site are monument games: games designed to test new ideas about learning that have been studied in detail. They show how games can help young people learn to think in innovative ways for a changing world.

The disappointing news is that these games are not (yet) widely available. They were designed to be tested, not distributed.

Monument is a surveying term for a permanently placed survey marker, such as a stone shaft sunk into the ground. Monuments serve as known reference points’”places whose location has been very precisely determined’”that can be used to establish the location of other points on a map.

These monument games provide images of what a new way of thinking about learning might look like. These games are deliberately designed to be best case scenarios. Building a new educational system for the digital age is a big undertaking’”one that requires political, institutional, and intellectual changes. Our hope is to begin that process of change by providing an image of what we need to do and how we might do it.

We hope and expect that, in the coming months, and certainly years, children will have easy access to these epistemic games and many others, at the moment they are quite deliberately images of possibilities, not blueprints or ready-to-use products.

For those interested in trying out the ideas about learning in these games, How Computer Games Help Children Learn also describes commercially available games that makes some of the same kinds of learning possible.