Our world is transforming before our eyes.  New digital technologies and an interactive web are causing a total shift in communications and commerce. Today's students have grown up immersed in these new technologies and studies have shown they learn differently than preceding generations.  Unfortunately because this shift has happened so quickly, our schools are still teaching skills more suited to an industrialized world than a digitized one.  As a result there is a huge disconnect between what happens in the "real world" and what happens in the classroom.  The latest generation of educational digital games and simulations have the ability to teach in ways never before available.  To quote the MIT Education Arcade white paper, Using the Technology of Today, in the Classroom Today, "these technologies don't just help us teach the old stuff in new ways--they can also help us teach new stuff in new ways." 

To read more about why games are such a powerful teaching resource, we recommend you read the excellent white papers from MIT's Education Arcade including Using the Technology of Today, in the Classroom Today, quoted above, and Moving Learning Games Forward.

The following websites contain many links to educational gaming information:

Social Studies Central Video Games in Education Links

http://www.socialstudiescentral.com/?q=node/58

Digital Game-Based Learning: It's Not Just the Digital Natives Who Are Restless

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume41/DigitalGameBasedLearningItsNot/158041

Creating Courses – Digital Games for Learning Links

http://www.ibritt.com/resources/dc_games.htm 

Penn State’s Educational Gaming Commons

http://gaming.psu.edu/EGCGamingResources

Institute of Play

http://instituteofplay.org

For research and information about gaming and libraries:

ALA’s Libraries, Literacy, and Gaming

http://librarygamingtoolkit.org 

Library Game Lab of Syracuse (Scott Nicholson)

http://gamelab.syr.edu

A great website about using board games to teach (Brian Mayer): 

A great website about using board games to teach (Brian Mayer): 

Genesee Valley BOCES School Library System Game Library

http://sls.gvboces.org/gaming/gamelibrary