Our DNA
Filament Games is a game production studio that exclusively creates learning games. Our core competency is developing games that combine best practices in commercial game development with key concepts from the learning sciences. Filament's prime directive is to create educational experiences that spark inspiration through interactive exploration and discovery. Secondarily, we seek to help teachers and parents excite their kids about learning, track their progress, and assess their performance.
Filament Games was founded in 2005 by game designer Dan Norton, education technology expert Dan White, and software engineer Alex Stone. In the time since, Filament has developed over 20 educational games for clients ranging from National Geographic’s JASON Science to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics. We have also developed a proprietary isometric game engine called Flare that allows us to develop high quality Flash games efficiently and effectively. Finally, we are proud to have received grant funding from the MacArthur, Kauffman, Annenberg, and National Science Foundations, as well as the US Department of Education.
The quality of our games is reflected by several key facts:
- Efficacy studies have unanimously demonstrated that the games produce substantial learning gains
- The games have received myriad awards and other forms of formal recognition, including (most recently) an SIIA CODiE for "Best Education Game or Simulation"
- Our iCivics games are used in 40 states and approved as a textbook in South Carolina
- Our partners and clients consistently report outstanding player traffic statistics and deem our games a critical component of their 21st century instructional strategies.
Our Methodology
Filament's 17 person development team represents expertise in game design, programming, art, sound, quality assurance, and the learning sciences. The titles in our portfolio, including both 3D Torque games and 2D Flash games, cover a diversity of STEM, literacy, and civics education topics. Every game we make is subject to an extremely high standard of quality, extending to often neglected areas like accessibility, usability, efficacy, and visual/auditory fidelity.
We always begin the development process by identifying core learning objectives. Based on those objectives, we then design custom-tailored gameplay mechanics: actions the player can take in the game environment that scaffold them from understanding the learning objectives to internalizing them, and finally, to demonstrating them. Second, we design an identity for the player that empowers them to become invested in the game mechanics.
Our Philosophy
We have been iterating on our core design/pedagogic philosophies since day one, but the tenets below represent a few central themes that have persisted across the years:
- Learning is naturally pleasurable. There is no reason to awkwardly sandwich learning content between mechanics that are designed solely to be "fun" or are otherwise divorced from learning objectives.
- Good games embrace experimentation and, by extension, failure. They prioritize inquiry over right versus wrong.
- Rather than focus on content, good learning games focus on building problem spaces in which content has authentic utility.
- Games are not a good fit for all learning goals. Good games leverage the affordances of digital interactions (e.g. teaching tacit knowledge) and avoid the weaknesses (e.g. natural language processing).
- All games are learning games…most just don't teach anything of value in the real world.
