This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit The Academic Common's Website. © 2014. This publication is made available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 US license.

Bryant, Todd. Challenges to Games in Education Reaching the Mainstream. The Academic Commons (Article published online July 24, 2014). http://www.academiccommons.org/2014/07/24/challenges-to-games-in-education-reaching-the-mainstream/

Games have received a great deal of public attention over the past 10 years and with good reason. With his book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, James Paul Gee laid out sound pedagogical principles used by video game designers that enabled them to create a product that was very engaging and at the same time extremely challenging and complex. The book was extremely influential and organizations focused on games and learning were established shortly thereafter, including Games for Change in 2004 and Games + Learning + Society in 2005. Since then games have remained prominent in education. The number of articles matching the term “game-based learning” in Google Scholar has increased steadily each year from 604 in 2004 to 2310 in 2012. Educational uses of games have received major grant funding from the NEH, Catherine T. MacArthur, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations. They have also received serious attention from mainstream media including news organizations NPR and CNN, the New York Times best-selling book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, and as an exhibit in the Smithsonian.