What’s New for GDT?

 

“What have you been up to?” is a question we’ve been getting a lot lately. So we wanted to get everyone up to speed on what we’ve been working on at the Game Design Thinking Research Group.

WINTER

This winter Margarita has been spending a lot of time in The Hague on our latest initiative, The Peace Innovation Institute. It’s been a pleasure watching the excitement grow from working with NGOs and academics in Northern Europe, and we appreciate the support we’ve been getting from the city of The Hague. Margarita has been sharing our work around Game Design Thinking and getting solid feedback on how to extend it further into the world of innovation. Margarita was also featured on the Interconnected Individuals podcast, where she spoke about Behavior Design and her own experiences in the industry.

Chris met with his fourth cohort of Learning, Design and Technology Masters students in School of Education, and gave them a detailed introduction to GDT and how they can apply the frameworks to their capstone graduate projects. Helping to mentor and judge these LDT projects is always a highlight of the summer.

SPRING

Margarita and Chris are helping to kick off a new project with Santander Bank in their role with the Peace Innovation Lab at Stanford. This will involve Margarita making more trips to Europe to train these bright company teams in our current innovation practices and co-creating frameworks for success, while Chris supports the team with content on GDT from California.

Chris is co-teaching two classes this spring; one new and one legacy.

EDUC/ENG 391: Engineering Education and Online Learning

This will be Chris’ fourth year involved in this course, and this spring we have revamped the syllabus to give student teams more exposure to the craft of prototyping and time to develop their prototypes of functioning educational technology. This is always a good opportunity to teach GDT material and learn from our students.

CS 377G: Serious Games

This is a new class for Chris, who guest lectured for Christina Wodtke in this class last fall. We will be helping student teams to design and prototype analog and digital games that have a specific outcome in mind. This is an excellent opportunity to apply the GDT frameworks to often real-world problems.

 

We hope to see you soon around campus or online!

Chris & Margarita