Games and other apps that may improve education have been getting a lot of attention from the U.S. Department of Education this summer. From special day-long meetings at E3 and Games for Change to a dozen regional meetings with game developers, the federal agency has been reaching out to inspire an entire new kind of educational publisher.

Richard Culatta, the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Ed, said there is an obvious reason for the flurry of visits and actions by the department.

The Internet is coming.

More specifically, a federal program that has been investing in high-speed connectivity should mean that in the next two years 99 percent of kids will be sitting in classrooms with high-speed wifi.

But Culatta said that is a big part of the reason for the meetings.

“All the infrastructure doesn’t matter unless we have the tools and apps that take advantage of it,” he told gamesandlearning.org recently. “I think it is going to happen, but I don’t think it is going to happen unless we are really engaged to make sure we have the right tools and apps.”

Culatta said he is looking for all kinds of developers to embrace the opportunities the new digital infrastructure in schools provide, but is keenly interested in developers build new tools and apps made specifically for the classroom.

“While I am certainly excited about existing games being used in creative ways in the classroom (I think that is great and clearly motivating for students), I am really interesting in applying the elements of game design – the things that we have learned make the experience engaging and interesting for students – to some of these challenges that have been unaddressed for too long in education,” he said.

Listen to the full conversation here:

The following is a partial transcript of our conversation with Richard Culatta.

Gamesandlearning.org: So, about these meetings you have been having all over the country, I’m curious… how many have you had thus far and if you were to tick off the big points you’re taking away from these meetings, what would they be?

Richard Culatta: It’s about 10 to 15. There is a number of things that we are seeing as we are having these conversations – and they’re fantastic conversations. There are two main things, one is there is a huge excitement from the development community about building tools and apps for learning. It’s just so much fun to see. But often the understanding of what the needs are is somewhat narrow and it often is just around apps to improve specific subject matter learning, specific content area expertise, you know, a math skill or a science skill. While those are certainly important one of the things we established with our developer guide is a whole variety of opportunities, some 10 different opportunities, where tools and apps can be transformational for learning and only one of them is improving subject matter skills – direct content instruction. So that is the first thing. I think people are just impressed with the range of the opportunity for creativity to building tools and apps for education.

The second piece is understanding how to work with the education – where and how to work with teachers, where and how to involve researchers to actually measure whether any of the tools are effective. That’s a whole second sort of thread of the conversation which is really interesting for the people who have been excited about working in the space, but not necessarily sure how to engage the right stakeholders and so having some great discussions around that has been really exciting.

Gamesandlearning.org: How big a market could games really be in the classroom? Does there need to be a reimagining of the classroom for games to have the impact that they could have?

Richard Culatta: I think it is important to recognize that we are at a time of real transformation in the education system we have, over the next two years, 99 percent of students are going to be sitting in a classroom with high-speed WiFi Internet. That’s a really significant change. So it means there are a whole variety of opportunities for students to connect and engage and learn and collaborate and that’s a big opportunity. And I think that’s the reason why it is a good time to be thinking about what sorts of opportunities there are for games and other apps. You know, clearly we have a focus on games, but there are a whole variety of apps that need to be created and I don’t know if we have ever had such an opportunity to take advantage of as this time when we are transitioning to where we have connectivity in essentially all schools.

Gamesandlearning.org: These apps that serve the school community… do you think this is a whole new set of products? Will there be more Minecrafts being incorporated into school or more games and apps built specifically for the classroom?

Richard Culatta: That’s a good question and I don’t know if I have the answer to that, but I do think there is a huge need for games that are actually built to specifically address needs in the education space. Frankly, there are a lot of opportunities that we don’t have enough people working to find a solution for. While I am certainly excited about existing games being used in creative ways in the classroom (I think that is great and clearly motivating for students), I am really interesting in applying the elements of game design – the things that we have learned make the experience engaging and interesting for students – to some of these challenges that have been unaddressed for too long in education.

Gamesandlearning.org: How does a developer get started?

Richard Culatta: The reason we created this guide is so that there would be a simple tutorial for anybody who is interested in getting into this space. You know, what are the boundaries? What are the opportunities and who can you collaborated with if you need a hand? That’s the purpose of the guide and so I think that is a really good first step. But there are a bunch of other ways that people can understand the needs and in the guide we list a whole bunch of places where developers can just engage with educators – whether it is at conferences or online through Twitter chats and things like that…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyj1q6YFgoI

Gamesandlearning.org: When you went into these meetings with developers what were you expecting and what surprised you the most?

Richard Culatta: We started by talking with a lot of developers, before we ever created the guide. We spent a lot of time talking with the developer community and… talking with the VC (venture capitalist) community. And one of the things we heard from the VC side, I’ll start there, was a lot of times people would come to them with great ideas, but it wasn’t developed enough. It just didn’t make sense to receive funding at that point either because they didn’t understand a model to make it sustainable or there was just some basic issues with their approach that they hadn’t addressed appropriately. And the VC said, “Look our only option at that point is to say, ‘You’re not funded.’” That’s it. You’re not funded. They wanted to say, “You’re not funded but you have a great idea here. Don’t give up. You just need to understand some of the context here that you may not be paying attention to.” And so they said they wished they could have something to hand to them to just say, “Here look at this and then just come back and try again.” That’s the big piece that got us going and then the other thing, that I already mentioned about developers, was understanding how to work with schools…

Another one that has come up is thinking through how to make new tools and apps sustainable and a lot of use of the freemium model, you know, give it away and then at some point start charging for it, and that is certainly an approach that a lot of people use, but I think that there are some other approaches to making tools and apps sustainable that we also think are worth considering. So, if a freemium model doesn’t make sense for the tool or app being created there are other models.

Gamesandlearning.org: We have heard that the in-app sales model doesn’t port well into the classroom…

Richard Culatta: It doesn’t work well in the school space. It can even be misleading. Having a lot of teachers using a tool doesn’t mean that it is adopted in any official way by the school or district, which is challenging, because in the rest of the world number of users is a good metric, but it may not mean that there is any sort of formal adoption at the district level…

Gamesandlearning.org: Even if you build a good and effective tool you may not get found. Do you see any developments that may help address that?

Richard Culatta: That’s really our next area of focus to see what we can do in that space. I can tell you a little bit, but … one of the challenges is there isn’t really good data about the effectiveness of the tools and apps. There’s no real “Consumer Reports” for tools and apps. There are a lot of ratings sites, but those ratings sites are just sort of opinion. A “Five Star” rating is helpful but it doesn’t really state whether or not the tool actually meets the claim it is saying it is. If it says it saves a teacher time or creates engagement, a “Five Star” rating doesn’t really help you there. So we are starting a pilot program we hope to be launching in the next month or so around rapid-cycle evaluation. How can we quickly evaluate the effectiveness of these tools and these apps? And the hope is as we actually get some better data about the effectiveness available and in the hands of researchers and leaders and parents that that will make it easier to sort through the noise and figure out what tools and apps make sense for a given school or learning center.

Gamesandlearning.org: You’ve mentioned that this technology could be a real leveler in education – helping those students most in need. Why?

Richard Culatta: One of the biggest challenges that we see is just simply access: access to high quality information, access to high quality learning materials, access to experts and the actual courses. If you are in a rural school district with 500 students in your total school, maybe even less than that, maybe 250 students in your total school, and let’s say you want to take computer science or Russian, it’s not likely that that is going to be offered given your location. That is not a good enough reason to not provide a learning opportunity in a day of high speed connectivity, or will have it in the schools. So one is just providing access.

The other is, in addition to materials, is the cost of materials. We spend $8.1 billion of textbooks and other printed material. That’s a lot of money and that means often that schools that don’t have as much money or families that don’t have as much money often don’t have the newest materials and if you are connected to digital resources it sort of levels the playing field. You have access to all the same material.

Another way we leave students behind is just not having the materials being accessible to them for a variety of reasons, not having learning be accessible to them for a variety of reasons. So one of them is something as simple as if you’re learning English and it is isn’t your first language, the ability to simply touch and click and get a translation or get a definition of a word is really powerful and you can’t do that with print material. If I just need to zoom the print and make the word bigger, I can do that. Those are all supports that print material do not provide.

I said I would offer you two, but I will offer one more. When we are in a digital space we really open up the possibility of having personalized learning at scale. I think that is one of the biggest reasons we leave these students behind is every student has unique challenges and unfortunately in a traditional classroom we are sort of forced to teach to the middle and technology gives us the possibility to change that and to have sort of tailored learning activities for every student and that is another way we close equity gaps.

Gamesandlearning.org: So once this infrastructure is in place, the idea is to have a new wave of tools to address these issues?

Richard Culatta: This is the question you asked at the beginning of this call, which is why is this so urgent – that’s the reason right there. All the infrastructure doesn’t matter unless we have the tools and apps that take advantage of it. That’s why we are doing all this work. I’m optimistic that we’ll be there. We are spending a lot of time talking to developers, talking to educators. We are spending a lot of time producing resources like the developers’ guide and other materials to help with this process. I think it is going to happen, but I don’t think it is going to happen unless we are really engaged to make sure we have the right tools and apps. By the way, one of the things we haven’t talked about is we have an initiative called “Future Ready Leaders” and we have school leaders who pledged around the country – around 2,000 of them – that have pledged to really be models for transformation through digital learning for the rest of the country. So we are doing a lot of work with them because to even choose the apps or work with the app developers to build the apps we need, we have to have school leaders on board and engaged So that is a whole other strand of this.

It’s a big… It’s a lot work. We have a lot to do and getting the infrastructure is a huge first step but by no means is it the end in and of itself.