Today Amplify CEO Joel Klein unveiled a large selection of games designed to help students achieve core educational goals in English Language Arts and STEM. The company is producing more than 30 games targeted at middle school-age students as a part of its broader digital curriculum initiative.
The games, which are currently being piloted in schools across the country, will be playable on the Amplify Tablet and major mobile operating systems, including iOS. School districts may purchase the games —either bundled with Amplify’s digital curriculum or separately— in the spring of 2014 for classroom deployment at the start of the 2014-15 school year.
Lexica, Amplify’s English Language Arts game world, brings together more than 14 embedded games, each with multiple levels and episodes. Lexica is an immersive world packed with characters from literature and nonfiction.
Games embedded within Lexica include:
- Mukashi Mukashi: A syntax and storytelling game based on Japanese folklore. The game mechanics “make failure fun” while driving students to engage in sustained exploration of the impact of word choices within longer narratives.
- Story Cards: A collectible card game featuring authors and characters from classic and modern literature.
- W.E.L.D.E.R.: The educational version of a top-selling iOS word game.
- Tomes: A choose-your-own-adventure series with a focus on vocabulary, featuring characters from classic literature. I
- Unearthed: A game teaching students the many complexities and irregularities of subject-verb agreement.
- Sentence and Sensibility: An arcade-style word puzzle game that encourages students to use more varied and complex sentence structures in their own writing.
- Venture!: A bundle of quick-play games focusing on spelling, conjugation of irregular verbs and overcoming homonym confusion.
- Spelling Stone: A puzzle game that links spelling to morphology.
STEM games
For the 2014-15 school year, there will be at least 15 science, math and engineering games, including:
- SimCell: an immersive exploration game, with realistic depictions of the inner worlds of a human muscle cell.
- Crafty Cut: a swipe-to-cut puzzle game that enables students to explore the relationships between 3-D and 2-D geometry.
- Metabosim: a pinball-style game about how plants and people get energy.
- Habitactics: a puzzle game with a sardonically playful visual style, covering ecosystem interactions among predators and prey, fungus and decaying bodies, etc.
- Immuno-Defense: a real-time strategy game about using the various types of white blood cells to defend the human body from bacteria.
- Twelve: a story-rich puzzle platform that integrates math in elegant ways into core game mechanics.
- Food Web: an arcade-style, casual game that teaches about the complex relationships between plants and animals in an ecosystem.
- TyrAnt: a light, real-time strategy game where the player seeks to protect and grow a colony of ants.
