On 16th, March, 2017, Professor Bruce M. McLaren from Carnegie Mellon University delivered a lecture which revolved the research over educational games and the project METALS in Carnegie Mellon University.
Professor McLaren started the lecture with his research over educational games and showed the growing data about American adolescent students playing games. It was said that compared with the traditional education, if the education content was hid in games, it would help more. Other scholars’ relative researches were also shown to prove the strength of educational games. His research team developed a series of individual educational games aiming to correct students’ decimal mistakes and help them to figure out the position of the decimal point.
The game was adopted to the decimal teaching of students in two schools in which 70 received the game teaching but 83 didn’t. The data they got indicated that the game teaching could help learning, especially for inferior students, girls and difficult problems.
Then he introduced the METALS project in Carnegie Mellon University. As he said, the education technology had a huge potential market including many companies and abundant capital input. METALS contained various courses, one of which is the Capstone Project. It lasted for two semesters and was organized by group where students could write the report and made the presentation. The course invited students with different academic background and would help them to learn more about education, software design, and so on.
Finally Professor McLaren made the academic communication with many students and encouraged them to do better in this area in the future.
