Valve Unveils Steam For Schools, Portal In the Classroom

Here's the actual site that Valve has published regarding this particular effort:
http://www.teachwithportals.com/ [teachwithportals.com]

A few things not quite clear in TFA:
1) These are not retail versions of Steam nor Portal 2:
1a) As mentioned, it is a locked down version of Steam called Steam for Schools. Only one application is available right now:
1b) A modified version of Portal called Portal 2 Puzzle Maker which takes most of the concepts in the game but makes it more interactable (i.e. here's a room, here's a pallette of tools, here's what you need to figure out or do...) - a game design tool more than a game.
2) For the teachers among us (me included), they've already collected a number of lesson plans for both Physics and Math curriculums. They're both tending to higher grades (ie 9-12) right now (e.g. parabaloid motion, harmonic oscillation, gravity, spatial geometry/volumes, etc) which makes sense, however, I've only taken a cursory glance as I'm supposed to be marking exams right now... (oops). They're also accepting lesson plans, etc.
3) It looks like they're aiming to extend lessons into the Chemistry, Game Design, Language Arts, and more categories - color me excited as I'm a Chem teacher!

It's unfortunate I'm only finding out about this right now as it's pretty close to the end of the school year, but I supposed the summer is a good time to play with it and figure out how to integrate it into the classroom. For those who are already getting steamed re: "they should be buying textbooks, etc", I have to say that computing resources are already in schools and to a large part being wasted on Facebook and flash games for the most part - this is just another tool to enrich courses and make the curriculum come alive. Oh, and for those that would rather us teachers "take our students outside to learn about physics", I challenge you to a) take more than 5 kids outside and try to keep a lesson run coherently with all the sundry distractions and b) try to do it in the middle of winter.

Kudos to Valve for willing to venture into this territory! Now, let's just get that Linux port finished already okay...?:)

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