By Laurel White
Two educational video games created at UW–Madison’s Field Day Lab have been chosen as finalists in the national 2024 Games for Change Awards.
The awards recognize the best social impact games and extended reality experiences of the year from across the country, highlighting creativity, innovation, and powerful storytelling. Field Day Lab, which is located within the UW–Madison School of Education’s Wisconsin Center for Education Research, is an already award-winning game design and research lab.
Field Day Lab’s finalists are Headlines and High Water and Wake: Tales from the Aqualab. Headlines and High Water is nominated in three categories: Best in Learning, Best in Impact, and Best in Civics. Wake: Tales from the Aqualab is nominated in the Best in Environmental Impact category.
Headlines and High Water is aimed at giving middle school students crucial media literacy skills by allowing them to step into the shoes of a young journalist, gaining insight into reporters’ values, challenges, and what it takes to make — and recognize — quality journalism. Several media organizations across the state have written stories about the game since its release last year, including The Cap Times, Tone Madison, The Badger Herald, WGBA-TV in Green Bay, Wisconsin Public Radio, and PBS Wisconsin.
At the time of its release, Sarah Gagnon, creative director at Field Day Lab, said Headlines and High Water is aimed at providing a more nuanced look at journalism than other media literacy games.
“I thought, if we haven’t done a good job to explain what news is, what the series of practices for making news are, this means that any time there’s an error or we find out something new, kids come to disrespect the news,” she said. “I thought, ‘This is more important than being able to identify the scams.’”
Wake: Tales from the Aqualab is an immersive, life-sciences-focused game that aims to teach middle and high school students about scientific research practices through an engaging narrative arc about a budding ocean floor research scientist — and the nightmares that plague her.
At the time of its release, David Gagnon, director of Field Day Lab, lauded Wake as one of the lab’s most ambitious projects to date.
“I’m quite confident that Wake is one of a few projects of this size ever attempted,” Gagnon said. “The game has over 50 different challenges across a dozen ecosystems with hundreds of individual species, all numerically simulated.”
The Games for Change Awards will be handed out on June 27 at the 2024 Games for Change Festival in New York City.