Grant for Optimizing Games for Science Education

Science4Us Wins Department of Education Research Grant

“Since we want our children to successfully compete, we need to engage students in STEM activities in their formative years so they carry a love of science, technology, engineering and math with them.”

Ft Lauderdale, FL. July 19, 2013

Science4Us has been awarded a grant from the Department of Education for educational games in science. The grant funding will be used to optimize educational games to engage early elementary students in science education.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants are reserved for entrepreneurial small businesses using cutting-edge research and development (R&D) to design commercially viable technologies to solve tough problems.

The White House announcement of the award said, “The success of games-related proposals [the Science4Us proposal] reflects… the recent meteoric rise in popularity of mobile devices has enabled game-playing anywhere and at any time. This says a lot about the increasingly creative field of educational games, and the growing base of evidence indicating that games can be an important and effective component of our strategy to prepare a highly skilled 21st century American workforce.”

President Obama has called attention to the importance that children need to be competitive in future science and technology fields. John Edelson, founder of VocabularySpellingCity and Science4Us, agrees. “Since we want our children to successfully compete, we need to engage students in STEM activities in their formative years so they carry a love of science, technology, engineering and math with them,” he explains. “This is the mission of Science4Us.“

Principal Investigator, Catherine E. Christopher, says the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences project will allow Science4Us to improve its educational effectiveness by providing the opportunity to collaborate with experts from Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Florida Virtual School and the University of Iowa. This research will be carried out within Broward and Palm Beach counties to determine the usability of the product in actual Title I classroom settings. The goal of the project is to create an exemplary educational game-based curriculum to improve STEM education.

Background: Science4Us.com is being developed by VocabularySpellingCity whose initial product is VocabularySpellingCity.com, a game-based supplementary educational service. The company is dedicated to using technology to improve education focusing on today’s significant educational challenges.

The SBIR program at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Department of Education’s research division, provides up to $1.05 million to small businesses for the R&D of commercially viable education technology products.

For more information, email [email protected] or contact Perri Robinson at 954-626-3117.