Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education Editor: Richard E. Ferdig University of Florida, USA

an imprint of

Manuscript Authors | Reviewers | Editorial Board

Clark Aldrich | Sasha Barab | Sara de Freitas | David Gibson | Nichole Pinkard
Katie Salen | David Shaffer | Kurt Squire | Constance Steinkuehler | Richard VanEck

Clark Aldrich http://clarkaldrich.blogspot.com/

Clark Aldrich is the author of two traditional books, Simulations and the Future of Learning (Wiley, 2004), and Learning By Doing (Wiley, 2005), the non-linear glossary The Elements of Interactivity, and SimuLearn's award-winning simulation, Virtual Leader.

SimuLearn’s Virtual Leader (Best Online Product of the Year, in T+D magazine) is used in hundreds of business schools, corporations, and the U.S. military, with international versions including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and his books are used both as industry references and academic textbooks by leading universities.

For the creation of this work and others, Mr. Aldrich has received awards and distinctions, including being named an “E-learning Guru” by Fortune Magazine, “Visionary of the Industry” by Training Magazine, and a member of “Training’s New Guard” by the American Society of Training and Development.

In earlier assignments, Mr. Aldrich was the research director that had created and was topic leader for Gartner’s e-learning coverage, and worked on special projects for the executive office at Xerox.

Mr. Aldrich has also been interviewed as a subject matter expert by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNET, Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, CNNfn, U.S. News and World Reports.

He graduated from Brown University with a degree in Cognitive Science.

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Sasha Barab, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Indiana University http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab/

Sasha Barab is an Associate Professor in Learning Sciences, Instructional Systems Technology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. He also holds the Barbara Jacobs Chair of Education and Technology, and is the Director of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology. His research has resulted in numerous grants, dozens of academic articles, and multiple chapters in edited books, which investigate knowing and learning in its material, social, and cultural context.

The intent of this research is to develop rigorous claims about how people learn that have significant practical, pedagogical, and theoretical implications. His current work involves the research and development of rich learning environments, frequently with the aid of technology, that are designed to assist children in developing their sense of purpose as individuals, as members of their communities, and as knowledgeable citizens of the world.

Central to this work has been a focus on the understanding the value of conceptual play, referring to a state of engagement that involves projection into the role of a character who, engaged in a partly fictional problem context, must apply conceptual understandings to make sense of and, ultimately, transform the context. As one example, the Quest Atlantis project is a learning and teaching project that leverages strategies used in the commercial gaming environment to develop a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks (see http://QuestAtlantis.Org).

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Sara de Freitas BA (Hons), MA, PhD (Director of Research, Serious Games Institute) http://www.bbk.ac.uk/~sara/

Dr Sara de Freitas has recently taken up a new role as Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University where she leads the applied research group. Sara also holds a Visiting Fellowship at the London Knowledge Lab where she previously held the post of Manager.

Sara is also working with TruSim (Blitz Games), the Vega Group PLC and the Universities of Birmingham and Sheffield on a £2 million UK Department of Trade and Industry co-funded Serious Games research and development project which will develop highly immersive learning games to solve business training needs.

In 2003 Sara founded (and co-chairs) the UK Lab Group, which brings the research and development community together to create stronger links between industrial and academic research through supporting collaborative programmes and for showcasing innovative R&D solutions for the knowledge economy.

Sara publishes in the areas of: pedagogy and e-learning; change management and strategy development for implementing e-learning systems and educational games and electronic simulations for supporting post-16 training and learning. She is currently writing two books for MIT Press and one for Continuum Press.

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David Gibson, Ed.D. Founder and President, CurveSHIFT http://www.curveshift.com/about_team-bd.htm

Dr. Gibson is the Founder and President of The International Graduate Center, which focuses on experienced educational professionals. With support from the National Science Foundation, he is Executive Director of The Global Challenge (www.globalchallengeaward.org), a team and project-based learning and scholarship program for high school students that engages students in studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics in order to solve globals problems and creator He is creator of simSchool (www.simschool.org), a classroom flight simulator for training teachers currently funded by the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. For over ten years, Gibson served as Director of Research and Development at the Vermont Institutes, where he concentrated on partnership development, new programs, systems analysis, evaluation, strategic planning, professional networks, national partners, and telecommunications in learning. His research and publications include work on complex systems analysis and modeling of education, Semantic Web applications and the future of learning, and the use of technology to personalize education for the success of all students. His new book "Games and Simulations in Online Learning" published by Idea Group, outlines the potential for games and simulation-based learning. He is currently involved in translating simSchool and articles into Korean. His business, CurveSHIFT, is an educational technology company (www.curveshift.com) that assists in the acquisition, implementation and continuing design of games and simulations, e-portfolio systems, data-driven decision making tools, and emerging Semantic Web technologies.

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Nichole Pinkard, Ph.D. Director, Center for Urban School Improvement University of Chicago, http://usi.uchicago.edu/

Dr. Nichole Pinkard is the Director of Technology and Research Associate, Center for School Improvement, University of Chicago. Prof. Pinkard received her bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and a master’s degree in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Education from Northwestern University where she developed software to leverage background knowledge to teach beginning reading. She received the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies and an NSF Early CAREER Fellowship. Her current scholarly interests include culturally responsive computer-based learning environments; cultural contexts affecting learning broadly and literacy specifically, visualization tools to support analysis of data, gender and technology, and ubiquitous scaffolds.

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Katie Salen Associate Professor, Parsons The New School for Design http://www.gamersmob.com

Katie Salen is an Associate Professor in the Design and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design and co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as the Game Design Reader, both from MIT Press. Interested in games as both aesthetic and cultural forms, she has developed a critical practice that includes designing games of many different types, from big games, to downloadable games, to conference games and game-hybrids that take gaming as a point of departure. She writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. Katie has worked on a range of projects for Microsoft, Gamelab, the Hewlett Foundation, the Design Institute, mememe Productions, Salty Features, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and others. She is a former member of Playground, a design team focused on large-scale, experimental, urban games. Playground has been recognized as helping to pioneer a genre of games know as Big Games-large-scale urban games that engage players in activity both in physical and online space; and recently explored another new genre of games-Slow Games-in the 25th anniversary issue of Metropolis magazine. Slow Games take 25 years to play.

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David Shaffer, Ph.D. Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison http://epistemicgames.org/eg/?cat=28

David Williamson Shaffer is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the departments of Educational Psychology and Curriculum and Instruction, a Game Scientist at the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory and a Research Associate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy.

Before coming to the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Shaffer taught grades 4-12 in the United States and abroad, including two years working with the Asian Development Bank and US Peace Corps in Nepal. His M.S. and Ph.D. are from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he taught in the Technology and Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is a founding member of the GAPPS research group for games, learning, and society. The group recently received a $1.8 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study games and media literacy in the digital age. Dr. Shaffer has a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his work on Alternate Routes to Technology and Science and was the recipient of a Spencer Foundation National Academy of Education Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Shaffer studies how new technologies change the way people think and learn. His particular area of interest is in the development of epistemic games: computer and video games in which players become professionals to develop innovative and creative ways of thinking.

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Kurt Squire, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/

Kurt Squire is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction. He is a former Montessori and primary school teacher and, before coming to Wisconsin, was Research Manager of the Games-to-Teach Project at MIT and Co-Director of the Education Arcade. Squire earned his doctorate in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University; his dissertation research examined students' learning through a game-based learning program he designed around Civilization III. Squire co-founded Joystick101.org with Jon Goodwin and currently writes a monthly column with Henry Jenkins for Computer Games magazine. In addition to writing over 30 scholarly articles and book chapters, and he has given dozens of talks and invited addresses in North America, Europe, and Asia. Squire's current research interests center on the impact of contemporary gaming practices on learning, schooling and society. Along with several other University Wisconsin-Madison faculty, he runs the Games and Professional Practice Simulations (GAPPS) initiative located at the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab.

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Constance Steinkuehler, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison http://website.education.wisc.edu/steinkuehler/

Constance Steinkuehler is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communication & Technology program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. After researching and developing online environments for learning for five years, she shifted her focus toward the documentation and analysis of more naturally occurring online learning environments, specifically those designed for play (massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs). Her dissertation, completed in August of 2005, was a two-year online cognitive ethnography of the game Lineage (first I, now II), focusing specifically on the forms of cognition, learning, and literacy recruited from those who game. She earned her Ph.D. in Literacy Studies in the Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, her MS degree in Educational Psychology at University of Wisconsin in 2000 and before that, three simultaneous BAs in 1993 at the University of Missouri-Columbia in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. She teaches Research in Online Virtual Worlds; Analyzing Online Social Interaction; Gender and Technology; and Critical Instructional Practices on the Internet and runs the annual Games, Learning, and Society Conference held each summer in Madison WI. She was an associate lecturer in Educational Psychology, a Spencer fellow, and writes online for Joystick101.org and Terra Nova.

Her current work focuses on the potential of virtual worlds to function as sandboxes for the reconstruction (perhaps, reinvigoration) of a new form of twenty-first century citizenship – a “pop cosmopolitanism” marked by the willingness to engage in an increasingly globalized and therefore diverse socio-technical world and the development of intellectual practices crucial to successful navigation within it. Such intellectual practices include informal scientific reasoning, collaborative problem solving, media literacy (defined not just as critical media consumption but also production), computational literacy, and the social learning mechanisms that support the development of such expertise (e.g., reciprocal apprenticeship, collective intelligence). She has been a siege princess, a mon calamari dancer, a human priest herbal/alchemist with a penchant for flowers in dangerous places, Wu the Lotus Blossom with a best friend named Dawn Star, a pudgy spaceman who orders around many small vegetable-ish creatures, a pink Master Chief, the misunderstood hero of the story, the last chance at world salvation destined to save the world (and the princess), god, and the master of a very big big ball.

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Richard VanEck, Ph.D. Associate Professor, University of North Dakota http://idt.und.edu/~rvaneck/

Richard Van Eck is Associate Professor and Graduate Director of the Instructional Design & Technology program at the University of North Dakota (UND). He received his Ph.D. in instructional design and development from the University of South Alabama. He was on the instructional design faculty at the University of Memphis for 5 years, where he was also a member of the Institute for Intelligent Systems and the committee chair for the Center for Multimedia Arts in the FedEx Institute of Technology, and he was elected to the board of directors for the North American Simulation and Gaming Association in 2006. He has published extensively in the field of digital game-based learning, is a frequent keynote speaker on serious games, and has authored several original games for learning. He has also published and presented on his research in K12 and corporate settings, including intelligent tutoring systems, pedagogical agents, authoring tools, and gender and technology. He resides in North Dakota with his wife Sandra and their two dogs and three cats, where he is currently working with a colleague on a adventure game about air pollution tied to the Science as Inquiry national standards.

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