A new videogame design lab is coming to Silicon Valley, but its goals are different from the studios that cook up the next “Battlefield” war simulation shooter or “World of Warcraft” multiplayer fantasy game. This one is focused on helping students learn.

Electronic Arts is going to be home for a new project called the Games, Learning and Assessment, or GLASS, Lab. The effort is funded in large part by $10.3 million in grants from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The project will have two primary goals: building next-generation educational games, and creating tools to take existing games, potentially such as EA’s upcoming “SimCity,” and measure what students learn from them.

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Three powerhouses coming together.

Fascinating that Gates foundation is working through EA instead of Xbox.

Interesting, indeed. Although based on the Chronicle interview with Bill Gates, he's still fiercely defensive of the "low-cost PC" as the right device for learning and schools, rather than the iPad. I thought that was interesting.

Xbox Kinect does have an accelerator that supports, in part, games that help folks learn.

Xbox IS that low-cost PC. Microsoft just doesn't admit it yet.

Kinect has so much interesting education potential. It's a vastly untapped segment of the market right now.

So yeah, in light of that, I'm surprised the Gates Foundation is not investing in that more.

I had not thought about it that way. That is a fascinating insight; one worthy of more conversation and creation.