Teaching

LS 451: Design of Playful Learning Environments (Syllabus)
This graduate seminar course explores how playful environments can be designed to support learning in exciting and unexpected ways. We define play broadly, as the act of exploring or manipulating to satisfy curiosity, which can arise through engagement with fantasy and narrative, making and creating, as well as structured games and sports. To guide our exploration we read and discussed foundational research papers that explore the relationship between play and learning, design papers that provide examples of playful learning environments, and evaluation papers that describe methods for analyzing the mechanisms of how learning happens through play. Students apply their knowledge of these papers through a quarter-long project on a topic of their choice, which must involve either the design of a playful learning environment or the analysis of a playful learning environment design. Taught: Fall 2019.

LS 3O1: Design of Learning Environments
In this project-based course, students work in teams to design environments to help people learn new content and skills. When I teach this course, we focus specifically on the design of educational games that incorporate playful elements to support engaged learning. Teams work with real clients in the educational games space, and conceive of, build, and test a design for an educational game to serve this client. The course helps students develop skills in human-centered design, learning environment design, and agile project management and communication. Taught: Sprint 2019.

CS 330: Human-Computer Interaction
Introduction to HCI and the process of designing computer systems to support people and organizations. The goal of this course is to understand how to surface human needs and learn how to employ a human-centered design process to build interfaces that effectively support those needs. Class discussion centers on understanding what makes interfaces effective and learning proven techniques and design principles for creating intuitive interactions. Students will work on quarter-long team projects to practice applying these design principles and evaluating their interfaces with users. Taught: Winter 2017, Winter 2018, Winter 2019.

CS 397/497: Design, Technology, and Research (DTR)
Students participate in DTR through fast-paced, quarter-long programs (intended to be repeated). Students work with a mentor to identify a direction of research, explore and iterate over designs, prototype at varying fidelities, build working systems, conduct evaluative studies, and report findings through conference publications. As a cohort, students demo their prototypes, provide and receive feedback, and help each other resolve technical challenges. DTR adapts and extends agile development and design-based research practices with scrums, sprints, studio critique, design logs, and pair research. Students embraced these practices and praised their effectiveness for promoting productivity, learning, and collaboration. Co-director Winter 2017 to Spring 2018, officially co-taught in Fall 2017.