[Past Projects]
Dr. Joel Duff and Thomas R Beatman
Research focus:
I focus on how the intrinsic characteristics of games can be leveraged to aid in learning. Students will have an opportunity to engage in tabletop game testing and design, and exploring how biological concepts can be conveyed through formal and informal gaming experiences.
Despite its presence in the literature for decades, the idea of using games and gameful experiences for learning in both formal and informal environments has been rarely explored from the perspective of content experts or game designers. This explains why for in most cases educational games and gamelike content in the past few decades have frequently failed at being both fun and educational. By not only assessing the underlying educational and design frameworks, we can not only make games that both educate and entertain, but also lay out a cohesive philosophy on how others may do so.
This project involves:
- Aiding and assisting in the design and development of tabletop gameful experiences for learning about biology.
- Transposing gameful experiences into into full fledged games for science communication.
- Surveying the game design, cognitive science, and education literature for key theories and concepts for application, as well as biological topics that can be used in production of games and gameful experiences, as part of a larger synthesis project.