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Sandie Allen
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Moms’ startup uses virtual-world game, Robottega, to further STEM goals
By E. Douglas Banks
MHT's Rodney Brown: Honoring tech citizenship among companies
MHT's Galen Moore: Honoring innovation in New England
Breaking down the MIT $100K
For parents, the food industry’s Holy Grail would offer “nutritious” food that kids might actually find tasty and fun. Achieving the video game equivalent of such a balance — making games educational — has been equally fraught with difficulty.
But an MIT robotics researcher has teamed up with a video game entrepreneur and a Hollywood film executive to launch a startup to tackle that task: to create virtual-world games for youngsters that educate them in science and technology and help them aspire to become technologists themselves.
The principals hail from very different backgrounds: Cynthia Breazeal is a research professor of personal robots at MIT’s Media Lab; Vicky Wu Davis is founder of video game middleware firm Froghop Inc. and a longtime nonprofit director; and Paula Silver is owner of Beyond The Box Productions in Los Angeles and former marketing executive at Sony Pictures. But they point out that they share one important aspect: They’re all moms.
Their startup, Raw Diamond Inc., will attempt to be one of the first firms to offer a gameplay experience across several media to online users. Kids might log on to a game site, meet friends and create characters, but also stage a dance recital or play an online soccer game. From there, they could edit a “highlight reel” that gets sent to YouTube or a mobile phone.
Long term, the founders say the company may take a “Build-A-Bear” strategy that enables young users to create an actual robotic toy based on their online character creations.
“For me, it’s about a trans-media experience, about co-creating these characters,” said Breazeal, who is considered a pioneer in “social robotics,” and whose portfolio runs the gamut from huggable, plush creations to robots with natural facial expressions. “I’m really concerned about the future of our country and getting kids to see themselves as inventors, builders, creators. … Instead of waiting for someone else to do something, I asked myself what I could do about it.”
For Silver, whose marketing expertise helped propel such Hollywood hits as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” it’s about fostering creativity: “Kids will connect, create and collaborate. They may not be the performer, but they may be the lighting director or they may compose” within the game, said Silver.
And for Wu Davis, the effort is simply this: to make science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education appealing and accessible to youth — middle-schoolers and girls, in particular.
The website is expected to be called Robottega and is scheduled to go live this spring. “If they’re going to be spending time that much in virtual worlds anyway, why not leverage the creative experience to learning STEM,” said Wu Davis. “Good educational games are, first and foremost, good games. The educational aspect should be the result of gameplay, not the genesis of it. The educational benefit will only be derived if they are actually attracted to Robottega on their own and will spend a consistent amount of time there.”
Growing Market for Virtual Worlds
| Users | 2009 | 2015 |
| Adult | 11.5M | 32.5M |
| Tween/teen | 125M | 395.6M |
| Kids | 50M | 638M |
Source: Strategy Analytics (Cumulative unique registrants, projected worldwide.)
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