As already reported by Prof. Fujimoto of the University of Tokyo on Twitter and Facebook, a paper I co-authored with him has been accepted for the special issue of the Japan Society for Educational Technology (JSET) journal. I would like to express my gratitude to the reviewers and editors for their guidance.

Toru Fujimoto and Masanori Yamada, “Current Status and Future Prospects of Evaluation of Educational Use of Games in Informal Learning”

It is scheduled to be published in Vol. 37(3) of the JSET journal. We have been presenting the content that Prof. Fujimoto and I have been reviewing together for the past two years at the JSET annual conference’s thematic research sessions. This paper organizes those findings and re-examines them through the lens of informal learning. While I have been monitoring international conferences on the educational and learning use of games and the development of educational and learning games since around 2006, there was still much I did not understand. When I served as a conference planning committee member, I launched a thematic research session on the educational and learning use of games. From the second session onwards, I have been working with the cooperation of Prof. Fujimoto. I believe our major goals were to improve the quality of discussions in these thematic research sessions and to create effective materials for those who wish to conduct research in this field or those who are already doing so but want to align their work with educational and learning theories in order to advance this research field in Japan. I feel this marks a significant milestone.

Now, the question is what to do next. I had a meeting with Prof. Fujimoto last week, and while we will continue to follow prior research and global trends, we both felt that we now want to move into the development and evaluation of games. Having worked on practice, theory, and evaluation, I would like to try developing and evaluating next. I am looking forward to what lies ahead.