Valve details Teach with Portals, Steam for Schools educational initiatives

Valve has announced Teach with Portals and Steam for Schools, initiatives offering Portal 2 and Portal 2 Puzzle Maker for education.

Teach with Portals and Steam for Schools are parts of an educational initiative that provides schools "free content and game design tools, as well as an interactive community for exchanging lessons and experiences," Valve announced recently.

"We have a limited version of Steam, which is called Steam for Schools," Valve's Leslie Redd said today at the Games for Change festival (via Joystiq). "And what we're doing is asking for teachers, after school programs, organizations — anywhere where there's a student relationship, which includes homeschooling — for them to submit a form to be part of it."

Teach with Portals, Steam for School's first software initiative, will provide Portal 2 and Portal 2 Puzzle Maker for educational purposes. It is an outgrowth of Valve's educational STEM program, which seeks to promote science, technology, engineering and math skills. The Teach with Portals website launched last week and currently includes lesson plans for physics and math with placeholders to expand the curriculum to chemistry, game design, language arts and others.

"We understand that learning is not fulfilled by a one-size-fits-all approach," a Valve representative wrote on the Teach with Portals website, "so we're engaging with a community of educators, parents and students to create infinite possibilities for learning. The educational version of our Puzzle Maker empowers students and educators to craft unique puzzles, explore worlds, and share custom lesson plans. Teachers can also simply leverage other contributor's shared lessons, selecting among the best of them to suit their learners' needs."