With support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation on April 15-16, 2005, The Education Arcade, MIT Comparative Media Studies program, The Virtual U Project, and The Serious Games Initiative hosted a two-day workshop at MIT titled "Game Simulations for Educational Leadership & Visualization: Virtual U and Beyond". This event was designed to look at the past, present, and future of games about education and educational life.

To date, there have been over a half-dozen entertainment and non-entertainment efforts dealing with school management and leadership that have been produced or planned. These games explore such topics as the future of community colleges, how universities are managed, how rumors circulate in schools, and how social cliques form within school environments. We want to examine these games and their application to school management as we reflect back on the evolution of the Virtual University Project over the past four years.

Virtual U is recognized as a pioneer of a new class of games commonly called "serious games". Drawing upon the lessons learned from the Virtual U project, participants explored the ways games and simulations can aide leaders, students, faculty and the public-at-large to develop a better understanding of the challenges confronting education in an era of globalization, fiscal constraint, and technological change.

Conference Highlights
The workshop was divided between traditional lectures and panels and sessions designed for group participation. Highlights included:

• What I Learned Building VU by Bill Massy
• What in Educational Leadership Should Games Be Utilized For?
• What Does it Take to Build A Serious Game?
• An Evening Reception at the Home of Henry Jenkins
• Virtual U: Life to Date - Lessons and Opportunities
• Inside Instructional Design & Virtual U: How Games Actually Get Used in Classrooms
• Serious Games & Education - Examples to Consider
• Educational System Design Breakouts Where Participants Are Asked to Help Design Games

Participatory sessions involved all conference attendees working to brainstorm designs, project plans, and fundraising strategies that can be used to solicit the resources necessary to see at least one or more major new educational leadership game under construction by mid 2006. An additional block of time was devoted to general, open discussion of the educational use of games and the serious games field more generally. This included demos of games-for-learning by their creators including MIT's Revolution game, and the TelecomPioneers Project: Connect science games.