Filament Games is an American educational

video game developer A video game developer is a broad term for a software developer specializing in video game development – the process and related disciplines of creating video games. A game developer can range from one person who undertakes all tasks to a large ...

based in

Madison, Wisconsin Madison is the county seat of Dane County and the capital city of the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2020 census the population was 269,840, making it the second-largest city in Wisconsin by population, after Milwaukee, and the 80th-lar ...

and founded in 2005 by partners Daniel White, Daniel Norton, and Alexander Stone. They are a design and production studio specializing in the creation of authentic gameplay mechanics that are also accurate representations of educational content. By actively embedding learning objectives within game activities, Filament's games help players transform their play experience into real world knowledge.

Philosophy

Filament's design philosophy is closely based on the scholarship of

Kurt Squire Kurt D. Squire (born July 10, 1972, in Valparaiso, Indiana) is a professor at The University of California, Irvine, member of the Connected Learning Laboratory, and former director of the Games, Learning & Society Initiative at the University ...

Constance Steinkuehler Constance Steinkuehler (Squire) is an American professor of Informatics at the University of California–Irvine. She previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before taking public service leave, from 2011-2012, to work as a Senio ...

, and

James Paul Gee James Gee (; born April 15, 1948) is a retired American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee most recently held the position as the Mary Lou Fulton Presidentia ...

, who pioneered much of the research about the value of games as teaching tools. Filament is also a close affiliate of the annual Games Learning and Society Conference.

History

The company received national recognition for their series of civics games launched by

Sandra Day O'Connor Sandra Day O'Connor (born March 26, 1930) is an American retired attorney and politician who served as the first female associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1981 to 2006. She was both the first woman nominated and th ...

for

iCivics iCivics, Inc. (formerly Our Courts) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in the United States that provides educational online games and lesson plans to promote civics education and encourage students to become active citizens. iCivics was ...

, her civics-education initiative. These games include ''Do I Have a Right?'', ''Executive Command'', and ''Liberty Belle's Immigration Nation''. Filament has also developed games for the

JASON Project The JASON Project is a US K-12 science curriculum program that is designed to motivate and inspire students to pursue interests and careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The JASON Project's approach to science education ...

at National Geographic, and is currently working with MIT's Education Arcade to build an MMO to help high school students learn

STEM Stem or STEM may refer to: Plant structures * Plant stem, a plant's aboveground axis, made of vascular tissue, off which leaves and flowers hang * Stipe (botany), a stalk to support some other structure * Stipe (mycology), the stem of a mushro ...

subjects. In spring of 2011, Filament's game ''You Make Me Sick!'', in which the player acts as a virus and tries infect a host, won the developer prize in the National STEM Award Video Game Challenge.

Development History

References

External links

Company websiteFilament Learning website
Video game companies of the United States Companies based in Madison, Wisconsin Companies established in 2005 {{US-videogame-company-stub