Giving Compass' Take:

· EdSurge talks with Dan White, co-founder and CEO of Filament Games, about how educational games can be used as a helpful tool to grab students' attention and involve them in learning.

· How does game-based education help students build helpful skills they will need in their future? How is it changing the way we teach? 

· Here's more on using teaching games to engage students in their learning. 

Dan White, the co-founder and CEO of Filament Games, an educational video game developer based in Madison, WI, knows from personal experience that kids can get a lot more out of video games than entertainment, sharpened reflexes and enviable manual dexterity. Back in the '90s he was a devotee of Civilization, a game where players run an empire from the dawn of time to the Space Age. “Along that timeline you make all sorts of interesting strategic decisions about your empire,” says White. “Now I run a 40-person ‘empire’ at Filament. I have to do a lot of the same strategic thinking that I enjoyed doing in that game.”

EdSurge: First things first. Why is game-based learning so relevant for students today?

Dan White: I recently saw an EdSurge Q&A where the former chief of Google China was quoted saying that within 15 years, nearly 50 percent of jobs in the U.S. will be done by machines with artificial intelligence. So it is going to be essential for students to have skills that are unique to the human brain. You often hear these skills—such as collaboration, problem solving, communication and critical thinking—referred to as higher-order thinking skills or 21st-century skills or future-ready skills. The exciting thing about game-based learning is that students are practicing these types of skills all the time when they play games. Even a game like Candy Crush is hitting some of these skills. And the more complex and challenging a game is, the more skills it’s going to hit.

Read the full article about game-based learning by Kelli Anderson at EdSurge.