MIT to Develop an Educational MMO

It looks like the MMO industry is going to get a little taste of smarts!

One of the world’s top ranking universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), will be creating a massively multiplayer online game to teach students mathematics and biology in high school classrooms; it will have a healthy $3 million dollar budget. The upcoming educational MMO will contain task-based strategies with achievements to give teachers an idea on how much students are learning from the process.

Eric Klopfer, MIT associate professor and director of the Education Arcade and the Scheller Teacher Education Program, explains the idea behind the game:

“This genre of games is uniquely suited to teaching the nature of science inquiry because they provide collaborative, self-directed learning situations. Players take on the roles of scientists, engineers and mathematicians to explore and explain a robust virtual world.”

According to the press release, Klopfer’s team will be working closely with Filament Games, a Wisconsin-based games production studio. A small number of Boston-area teachers and students will take part in a pilot phase of the project in the spring of 2012 using a prototype of the game. By the end of the three-year project, the game is expected to have 10,000 users nationwide.

The $3 million MMO project is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

MIT Education Arcade has developed a total of 15 games for educational purposes but I think it's safe to say that this might be their most ambitious project to date.

Source: MIT Press Release