Gaming

Partnership Will Pair Interactive Games With Economics Textbooks

• By Michael Hart
• 03/11/15

MobLab.com, a company that designs and creates experiential games, will pair up games with college economics texts provided by Worth Publishers, an imprint of Macmillan Education.

MobLab will create a library of hands-on experiments in which students can produce their own data as they simulate markets, allowing them to apply the economics concepts they're learning about. Instructors can customize each game to match their curriculum so that students can receive real-time results and data analytics that allow them to test their choices against economic theory.

"The pairing of textbook content written by exceptional economists with the interactivity and student-centered learning found in MobLab's online games and experiments provides instructors with the tools they can incorporate in their classroom," said Macmillan Education Vice President of Editorial, Science and Social Sciences Charles Linsmeier. "Few things incentivize engagement more than when students have the opportunity to utilize data they have created themselves."

MobLab, which designs and creates games for economics, business management and social science classes in higher education, will provide games for this partnership that allow students to explore concepts like supply and demand, market interventions and competition, accessing them all on computers, tablets and phones.

"When you get students' curiosity level up, learning becomes so much more motivated and effortless," said Walter Yuan, MobLab CEO and co-founder.

One product of the partnership is that students will be able to purchase the materials they need, both textbooks and software, at once, therefore saving money.

MobLab was founded in 2011 by Yuan, who managed the social science experimental laboratories at California Institute of Technology and University of California, Los Angeles, and Stephanie Wang, a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh.