How can we boost student engagement? What’s more, how can we use a medium that is sure to resonate with students in the modern classroom? These are the questions that got our LIVE Lab team at Texas A&M University not only thinking about innovation, but acting on it.
The LIVE Lab (Learning Interactive Visual Experiences) is a research facility at Texas A&M University College Station that develops interactive learning experiences. Established in the summer of 2014 by a few students and our director, André Thomas, our team set out to incorporate game methodologies with college-level materials, also known as game-based learning. Given Thomas’ background as the former head of graphics at EA Sports and a graphics creator for major motion pictures, he knew these couldn’t just be any games; they had to merge commercial production quality and educational rigor.
Experiential learning
Approached by an art history instructor here at Texas A&M, we tackled our first game-based learning challenge. In just two semesters the instructor had to cover 5,000 years of human art history on a global scale, which is like trying to see Europe in a speed train in a week. Game-based learning presented an ideal way to provide more context via a medium familiar to so many students. The result was the immersive art history game ARTé: Mecenas. In 2015, Thomas licensed the IP of ARTé: Mecenas to game-based learning company Triseum, a spin-off from the LIVE Lab.…Read More