NASA seeks proposals for collaboration with an organization to enhance NASA's ability to achieve its educational goals by creating and managing a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. The game would be fun and would enhance science, technology,
engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning. It is intended that this request will result in the establishment of a non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement (defined as one with no exchange of funds) that will define the full roles and responsibilities of NASA and the proposing organization. NASA’s Learning Technologies (LT) is the requesting office.1
LT encourages respondents to view the requirements in this document as minimum set of criteria and not as limitations. A successful MMO game that enhances STEM education will be a challenging and innovative undertaking that will require extensive creativity, talent, commitment and ignificant “outside the box” thinking from NASA and NASA’s partner in the endeavor.
For purposes of this request, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game is considered to be a persistent immersive synthetic environment with built in goals, achievement system and rules. Existing examples of MMO games in industry include EverQues®t,
World of Warcraf®t and Eve Online®. (Note: NASA does not endorse or sponsor any of these games; they are cited only by way of example.)
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1. LT is a research and development incubator for educational technologies projects. It is guided by the research agenda laid out in the NASA eEducation Roadmap: Research Challenges in the Design of Persistent Immersive Synthetic Environments for Education & Training(http://learners.gsfc.nasa.gov/NLT/Roadmap/ ) LT is part of the NASA Office of Education’s Elementary and Secondary/eEducation program and is managed at Goddard Space Flight Center as an agency-wide project.
