Programs and Initiatives
Microcredentials
Microcredentials are a conrnerstone of the Endless Lab’s mission to make learning visible, portable, and aligned with real-world skills. They represent short-term accomplishments, such as mastering a specific tool or demonstrating leadership in a team project, and are increasingly being converted into academic credit. Partnering with ASU’s Enterprise Technology and Learning Enterprise units, the Lab has emerged as a spearheading use case for ASU’s microcredentialing infrastructure. In its first year, the Lab issued nearly 100 credentials for game-based learning to students who participated in game-making events, workshops, and credit-bearing courses, marking an important early milestone in a much larger vision.
Endstar Game Studio: Turning Students into Game Makers
Endstar Game Studio is a project-based course where students step into the role of junior game developers within a collaborative studio environment. Designed to simulate the dynamics of a real-world game production pipeline, the course tasks students with working in teams to build a complete adventure game from the ground up, integrating level design, worldbuilding, asset creation, and scripting using the Endstar platform.
Throughout the course, students receive ongoing mentorship from the instructor as well as quest experts from the games industry, gaining valuable feedback, production insights, and exposure to professional workflows.
Meet MIRANDA : Mapping Learning Through Play
MIRANDA is an AI system designed to transform how learning that’s happening through gameplay is captured, understood, and validated. As “Multimodal Intelligent Recognition and Assessment for Next Generation Digital Accreditation,” MIRANDA analyzes gameplay and creative activity to identify emerging skills, cognitive strategies, and collaborative behaviors in real time.
By generating dynamic knowledge graphs from diverse player interactions, MIRANDA enables transparent, theory-aligned assessment, supporting personalized feedback and microcredentialing. It is piloted in educational, research, and industry settings to power new models of learning where playing, making, and reflecting become core pathways to next -generation digital accreditation. MIRANDA offers a transparent, theory-driven alternative to traditional black-box AI models, empowering educators and researchers to accurately track learning trajectories, foster skill development, and award microcredentials based on demonstrated learning outcomes.
Learning Ratings
The Learning Ratings Consortia, a joint initiative of the Endless Lab, Games for Change, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Microsoft, Thriving in Games Group, Endless Access, and Swedish Games Association, is a coalition aimed at redefining how video games foster learning. Guided by the principle of “learning through every game.” it envisions a future where any game can serve as a vehicle of learning, leading to development of real-world skills and knowledge.
The initiative’s purpose is to help game-players, families, and educators identify games that not only entertains but also enrich knowledge and skills, transforming the perception of game time from pure entertainment to a space where meaningful skills and knowledge are developed. It seeks to capture the natural learning that happens during play, and deepen our understanding of how players learn through games.
