Mobile Game-Based Learning project goes open-source

We haven't written much about mobile edutainment this year, mainly because there isn't much of it going on.

However, one intriguing scheme is the Mobile Game-Based Learning project, a three-year project that was the work of eleven partner organisations from Austria, Croatia, the UK, Italy and Slovenia.

Its aim was to develop mobile learning games designed for 16- to 24-year-olds, and a platform around them for "the presentation of playful and emotional educational content for use on mobile devices".

The project was supported by the European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) programme.

Anyway, the mGBL project has now been made available as open-source under the European Public Licence, and can be downloaded from the SourceForge website.

We think mobile edutainment could become more high-profile in 2009, especially if there's funding available for developers creating educational mobile games.

With that in mind, this project may be well worth a look for developers and publishers.