About WILA
WILA stand for Washington Interactive Learning Alliance. We bring education, research, and industry together around one goal: better learning for students through hands-on, interactive experiences.
We’re a volunteer-run alliance based in Washington State. We don’t build learning products ourselves. We connect the people who make interactive learning, the people who teach with it, and the people who study it — and we turn those connections into real experiences for students.
The gap we work on
We focus on bringing together 3 groups that can cover sourcing, running, and validating interactive learning opportunities: educators, industry professionals, and researchers. The commercial world is full of experiences that could teach, but they rarely reach classrooms. Educators want hands-on material but don’t have a line to the people making it. Researchers can tell what works, but often aren’t in the room when it’s designed.
WILA exists to close that gap. We put these groups together with a reason to collaborate, then help what comes out of it reach students.
What we do
Events. Gatherings built around interactive learning that put educators, industry, and researchers in one room with a reason to work together. Today that’s our monthly happy hours, where educators meet industry pros, and our annual collider, which pairs game developers with educators to build something together.
Community and media — in progress. We’re standing up an online community so these groups keep talking between events, and building out media — writing and a podcast — to move ideas between them and share what our events produce.
How we measure ourselves
We’re not a networking group, and turnout isn’t the win. We judge our work by what it produces for students: a new interactive experience, a collaboration between groups, or an opportunity placed in front of learners. We design each event backward from that outcome and document what actually happens — including when nothing does, so we can learn from it.
Who we work with
Our work runs on partners across all three groups: foundry10 as our research anchor; Seattle Indies and Perfect Day Games on the industry and creator side; and the Seattle EdTech Meetup and UW (HCDE, EarthLab) in education and community.
Our philosophy on interactive learning
Interactive learning is learning by doing: hands-on engagement with real topics and real problems. It covers games and play, simulations, competitions, hackathons and jams, apprenticeships, industry-submitted challenges, and building something real.
The best interactive learning already exists — it’s being built every day by studios, developers, and practitioners. It just rarely reaches students. So our job isn’t to invent it. It’s to source it from the people who make it, get it to educators who can use it, and bring in researchers to test and improve it. Three groups, one pipeline, pointed at students.
We’re not tied to any one subject. The point is helping students learn by working on the real problems of the fields they want to explore — and, in the process, helping them find out who they are.
Our History
We originally started as a program run out of the education research organization foundry10. There, Tom Swanson along with Tim Cullings of Seattle Indies and Jessica Pilsner of Seattle EdTech Meetup came together to develop out the first industry collider.
Since then, WILA has taken on the mantle of running these events with ongoing support from foundry10 and other organizations. We are excited to expand our operations now to include more events and an expanded set of offerings.