Over the past two years, educators have turned to digital technologies and media more than ever to meet the needs of students amidst a global pandemic. While many edtech tools enable educators to create interactive materials with digital media (e.g., Nearpod, Kahoot!, Quizizz), educators more often seek existing digital resources to supplement their curriculum rather than create them from scratch (National Center for Education Statistics, 2021). Interactive Lessons (ILs) on PBS LearningMedia, produced by GBH Education and fellow PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) member stations, provide teachers with free, standards-aligned, classroom-ready resources. This panel will discuss how GBH Education develops ILs and the IL authoring platform, including findings from research studies on IL usage. Two educators will also discuss how they participate in IL development and integrate ILs into their classrooms to support diverse learners.
This panel discusses how to challenge the status quo and create alternative career opportunities, especially for diverse talent. Through career technical education programs and the development of a registered youth apprenticeship for Animation, VFX, and Game Design, young people will have access to industry training as a part of their free and public education.
As part of developing and researching a virtual reality (VR) game intended to increase access to and broaden participation in STEM learning, designers and researchers from EdGE at TERC and interns from Landmark College, a post-secondary institute for learners with ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other learning differences, have been immersed in an intensive co-design process. Co-design embraces the ‘nothing about us without us’ movement by ensuring stakeholder voices, in this case neurodiverse learners, have a prominent role throughout the design process. We present our co-design process, key lessons learned, important game-design decisions, and the experiences and perspectives of individual co-design participants. And recommendations are provided to help guide others who are interested in implementing a co-design process of their own.
KaiUnEarthed.com is an interactive fiction video game that invites players to imagine liberated, unpoliced futures. Teenagers in the future encounter artifacts from our time as they go through a coming-of-age ceremony. This involves connecting with us, their ancestors, through interactive analog journals. The project was released in 2021 as a narrative prototype created in Twine, and a near-alpha prototype of the full video game was debuted at GLS 2022. While one of the designers played the game, the audience participated by shouting out suggestions for narrative choices; they also received their own journals, allowing them to interact with the analog game mechanics, taking home a personalized record of their journey. In this sense, the session was a cross between a Well-Played game analysis and a creative writing workshop. This demonstrates one possible use case for Kai UnEarthed in future critical game literacy learning spaces.
LoFi Hip Hop Worlds to Study In is a collection of three-dimensional worlds full of study spots with instrumental music and ambient sounds. Students can explore these worlds to relax while they take breaks from studying. The software allows them to set a timer to remind them to come back to their studies. When they do, they can set a new timer; the game-world remains inactive in the background, but the application continues to provide relaxing sounds and beats with no ads. The game was released on Itch.io in 2021 to support students with remote learning during the COVID19 pandemic (https://lofiworlds.itch.io/study). At GLS 2022 it was set up in the arcade to offer attendees some meditative downtime as they took a break from the intensity of the conference.
Relevate Sign Up is a gamified patient intake survey designed to collect demographic and relationship data from players to customize relationship research dissemination. In this paper, we report the details of the design choices and usability testing of the game. We also discuss lessons learned.
Emotional design has emerged as a critical area of research in game-based learning (GBL). Initial studies have yielded promising results indicating that learning games can be designed to purposefully induce specific emotions that support learning processes and outcomes. Yet, existing studies have not always yielded consistent results with regard to the expected effects of emotional design in learning games (Plass & Hovey, 2021). In order to make sustained and significant progress in this area, researchers have called for a systematic approach to evaluating the impact of emotional design on players’ emotions, learning processes, and learning outcomes (Loderer et al., 2019; Plass et al., 2019; Plass & Hovey, 2021). This paper draws upon research approaches from existing emotional design studies to propose an initial outline for such a systematic approach.
We've seen how games can change classrooms and communities for the better, but can they really help all of humanity survive — and even thrive? The United Nations has 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are must-reach targets for the year 2030, and have been crafted with the purpose of supporting continued comfortable human life on Earth. Epic Games has taken these goals to heart and are providing lesson plans that can be used with Fortnite Creative to educate a new generation on the importance of sustainability across many aspects of life.
It Comes In Waves is a narrative-based Twine game prototype about being an essential worker during the ongoing pandemic. It takes as its focus the role social class plays in relation to COVID-19 protocols surrounding workplaces and the subsequent effects these have on everyday life. You play as Beattie, a low-paid caregiver at two different long-term care facilities during the first few months of the pandemic, navigating the challenges of trying to stay safe while doing her two jobs and maintaining social contact with her friends and family. There were two central design goals for the game: first to show how social class inflects our daily experiences, including our employment prospects, opportunities in life, living experiences, and hopes for the future; and second to avoid the trap of becoming either an “empathy machine” or a misery simulator.
In this exploratory case study, we investigate how a collegiate esports team makes sense of gameplay data visualizations. Through our intervention we introduced the team to new data collection practices, provided data analysis and visualization support, and organized sensemaking sessions with the team to discuss implications of the analytics. Through an exploratory analysis of video footage, we identified three different sensemaking activities.
