The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has released Immune Attack, a free educational game. From the eSchoolNews article:

“Immune Attack” is a three-dimensional game that provides scientifically accurate simulations of the immune system, with imagery designed by medical illustrators. The game features conferencing and auto-tutoring technology meant to personalize the gaming and learning experience with content-rich sessions. It also contains a built-in assessment feature, through which users must answer questions to move on to the next level.

Designers intend the game to be used in or out of the classroom as a complement to curricula on biology and immunology and the FAS hopes to study the results to support development of more games for learning.

This is great news for students, teachers, parents, and gamers. Today’s media-savvy youth love games, including serious games, which offer a more immersive form of learning that may suit particular learning styles. And immunology is a great topic to tackle with increasing rates of chronic illness and therefore an increasing need for schools to help students develop readiness and resilience.

KnowledgeWorks Foundation is proud to have contributed $35,000 towards the field testing and refinement of this game. We congratulate FAS on the release and look forward to seeing how it contributes to learning.

06/16 Update: ABCNews published a great article on FAS

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 11:22 am and is filed under Smart Networking, Strong Opinions Strongly Held, Urban Wilderness. It has been tagged with adaptation, edutainment, gaming, immunology, serious games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.