Purdue University Announces Opening of Serious Games Center

Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, announced that The Purdue Center for Serious Games and Learning in Virtual Environments will open on February 12th, 2009. The opening will commence with a reception from 3 to 5 PM at Purdue's Beering Hall, located in Room 3288. According to an article in Purdue's student newspaper The Exponent, the center was created by Purdue assistant professor of curriculum and instruction Bill Watson as a place for professors to discuss their work with serious games and virtual environments. Watson previously taught a distance learning course at Purdue using the online virtual environment Second Life for classroom meetings. In a mission statement posted at the university's website, Purdue says that the center will "provide support for implementing, designing and developing serious games and virtual environments for learning; to encourage collaboration across Purdue and with K-12 schools; and, to establish a foundation for securing funding and conducting research at Purdue on the use of serious games and virtual learning environments in education." The Purdue Center for Serious Games and Learning in Virtual Environments will contain a number computer stations for developing serious games and virtual environments. A separate computer section will allow users to evaluate and participate in virtual world applications such as Second Life.