Greg Toppo

USATODAY

The place where the video game was invented more than 50 years ago now wants to teach teachers, entrepreneurs and students how to design games for learning — and it is hoping that the end result will be a new kind of tech tool for the classroom.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology today begins a free series of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, beginning with one on the design and development of educational technology. The second course, which begins Oct. 22, focuses on game design. Two upcoming courses will focus on educational games and implementing ed tech.

MIT's teacher education program already focuses on games, among other tools — it developed a middle-school math game, Lure of the Labyrinth, that has a cult following among teachers, and it is piloting a math and science multiplayer online role-playing game. The new courses are being offered through a department called the Education Arcade. But the new courses aim to help students both inside and outside of MIT produce saleable products. The final project for the first course will be a Kickstarter-like pitch for a new game-based educational technology.

"There has to be a real need," said Eric Klopfer, director of the Education Arcade, who will host the courses. "What we'd like to get out of it is some great, interesting ideas that maybe some people move forward with."

Unlike most MOOCs, Klopfer said, the four courses won't simply feature videotaped lectures and computer-graded problem sets. Most of the work will be group-based and the instructional material will consist primarily of interviews with experts in the field.

"We know that the stuff that has caught on most with MOOCs are things that can be assessed through automated testing," said Scot Osterweil, the Education Arcade's creative director. "We know we're not the only ones trying to think about more project-based MOOCs, but we also know that it hasn't advanced very far."

Though a few historians might dispute it, most say the video game as we know it was invented at MIT in 1962, when student computer hackers used the school's new PDP-1 computer to create a two-player rocketships-and-torpedoes game called Spacewar! Other players programmed a gravitational pull from the sun in the middle of the screen, an accurate solar system map and a "hyperspace" button that made players' spaceships disappear.

Its code was traded among computer networks spanning several campuses and eventually the PDP-1's manufacturer shipped the computer, and subsequent models, with the game loaded as a diagnostic tool. By the early 1970s, a computer scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center told Rolling Stone that Spacewar! "blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer." Long before most of us knew about carpal tunnel syndrome, all-night players complained of "Spacewar! elbow."

Osterweil said the new courses are the result of a "fairly high level of interest" in better educational technology from students fascinated with the field. For information on the courses, go to MIT's EdX website.

"You can't read about the new technology without finding somebody commenting about its application in education," he said. "Almost any new technology that reaches the public quickly spawns an interest in educational applications. I think the desire to apply it to education represents a powerful desire to change and improve education."