Play Make Learn 2018

In this project presentation, Jennifer Javornik and Ethan Cayko from Filament Games will talk about their recently released VR project Breaking Boundaries, which features VR stories about famous women scientists, including narration by Jane Goodall. We'll show off the project, talk about working with Jane Goodall and Oculus, and start a dialogue about contemporary VR development.

What is unique about the humanities– fields like history, literature, philosophy, civics, jurisprudence– in the practice of designing games? While serious games have long and storied history (no pun intended) with engaging the humanities, recent humanities-based games such as Assassin’s Creed Origins, 1979 Revolution, Walden, a game (and many others) have opened up new possibilities for not only reasserting game-based learning in humanities contexts, but also re-evaluating the design paradigms through which these games are made. Taking both a field-wide and in-the-weeds view of humanities games,  this talk will explore the process of designing games in the humanities, the challenges and affordances of doing so, and the possibilities for developing and producing humanities games for both educational and public audiences.

Embodied cognition looks at how our bodies are a key component of what we think and provides a framework for design principles to create movement based video games. We developed The Hidden Village to explore how in-game actions (i.e., engaging  the body to explore geometric properties by enacting transformations of shape and space) may improve rapid, unconscious forms of reasoning, such as mathematical intuition, as well as slower, more deliberate forms of reasoning involved in valid geometry proof construction. Along with presenting our designs and early empirical findings, we wish to engage our audience in the powerful ways that motion-capture technologies can bring people in more direct physical contact with the imaginary objects and abstract ideas that make mathematics an elegant and creative discipline.

Come play a new game produced by Wisconsin Public TV, Wisconsin Historical Society and Field Day in collaboration with over 20 Wisco educators! During this hands-on session we play, meet the designers and experience a historical inquiry micro-project ourselves.

During the session we will also be recruiting for the next Field Day Fellowship where educators will use the game as a starting point for historical inquiry projects in their own towns and cities.

Ecosystems are complex and dynamic systems that learners often experience as simplified, static snapshots in classrooms and curriculum. Simplifications too often remove the richness that makes them so challenging and yet compelling to study. Econauts immerses players in a rich environment, making difficult-to-observe ecological phenomena visible in a living landscape that players explore and examine to explore the relationships between choices that humans make and their ecological consequences.
In Econauts players learn to:
Identify time lags
Describe relationships among multiple drivers
Explain connections between land cover and land use and ecosystem response
Predict trophic cascades
Identify costs and benefits of different land use decisions
These difficult to teach concepts are often taught by tables, graphs and case studies, sometimes combined with one-time field trips. We have implemented Econauts in a variety of teaching and learning contexts in classrooms and in beyond classroom learning experiences for students and teachers grades 5-12. We have found that many students change in game strategy to limit environmental damage, some when they first see evidence of an algae bloom, most after a fish kill. About half of post-game play maps attempt to make the maps more ‘realistic’ and about half attempt to change the difficulty of the game play. High school students using Econauts within an ecology curriculum were more accurately able to identify, describe and explain scientific models compared to students in similar ecology curriculum absent Econauts.

In a pilot study funded by the WSGC, NASA, DPI, and WCER, Dr. Richard Barker (UW Astrobotany) and Mike Beall (Gear Learning) explore new methods for creating an informal space where middle school students from the Boys and Girls Clubs of Dane County can engage in learning complex Astrobotany content through the process of game design. 

For the VR industry, there seems to be one question on everybody’s mind: “Where’s the content?” If you ask content developers, though, they might pose a counter question: “Where’s the money?” With hardware adoption moving slowly, developing VR content is a risky endeavor. Join this session to hear Filament Games CEO Dan White‘s insider tips on practical ways to pursue VR funding, drawing on Filament’s experiences seeking and securing funding for two VR titles.  

The use of games in medical education can be powerful interactive learning tools and reinforce content material. These interactive platforms can make the science ‘come to life’ and thus become more meaningful for the learner. In this session, we will explore the history of ‘games’ in medical education, formats of games and how they can augment learning.

Meet and listen to some students from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Dane County as they share their experiences in learning the concepts of Astrobotany through the process of game design. Over the summer, the students met with Dr. Richard Barker (UW Astrobotany) and Mike Beall (Gear Learning) twice a week on the UW-Madison campus to design and create their own unique version a game designed to help players better understand the “Biology of Survival on Mars”.

Highlights and unexpected results of the collaborative design efforts between the UW - School of Pharmacy and Gear Learning.

In this session we will look at the Discover IceCube Project (https://fielddaylab.org/play/ice-cube/) as an example of how a multi-disciplinary team can develop an engaging and educational experience of learning complex science topics. The panel will discuss lessons in design, engineering, art and evaluation leaving participants with a better understanding of how VR can be used for science communication effectively. 

Esports, organized competitive video games, allows schools to redefine their athletic culture, diversify opportunities for student participation in school, promote positive physical and mental health, increase collegiate scholarship pathways, and play games! We cannot forget the importance of play. During this session, learn how esports offers gamers an opportunity to connect into their schools and communities like never before. Session participants will leave with a perspective that esports are more than just playing video games. They are the medium to something more.

In Fall 2018, 15 teachers from around Wisconsin used the UW created Siftr app to facilitate fieldwork projects with their students. In this hands on session you will try out a simple fieldwork activity in the conference venue and hear from teachers about how to get up and running in your own students. 

Tammi RA Kral, Diane E Stodola, Rasmus M Birn, Jeanette Mumford, Enrique Solis, Lisa Flook, Elena G Patsenko, Craig G Anderson, Constance Steinkuehler, Richard J Davidson


University of Wisconsin-Madison


Empathy is critical for navigating our social world, particularly during adolescence when individuals may benefit from using empathy to offset the negative impact of bullying, psychiatric illness and poor peer relations. Prior research indicates that empathy is a skill that can be trained with a variety of interventions, and video games provide a unique medium for training that is familiar and engaging to adolescents, and could be delivered at a large scale. We developed an empathy training video game, Crystals of Kaydor (Crystals), and investigated whether playing Crystals increased empathic accuracy (EA) and related brain activation in adolescents. Players randomly assigned to play Crystals learned to recognize six basic emotions, to gauge emotion intensity and respond empathically over 2 weeks of daily gameplay. Approximately half of the participants were randomly assigned to play a well-matched, active control game – Bastion. Participants completed an EA task during an fMRI scan before randomization and again following gameplay. There were no group differences in EA improvement following gameplay, however, engagement with training aspects of Crystals was associated with a higher increase in EA-related activation in right temporoparietal junction following gameplay – a brain region implicated in empathy and perspective taking. Moreover, resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) in empathy-related brain circuits (posterior cingulate–medial prefrontal cortex; MPFC) was stronger after Crystals gameplay compared to Bastion. The more individuals’ EA increased following Crystals versus Bastion, the stronger their RSFC in brain circuits relevant for emotion regulation (amygdala-MPFC). These findings suggest that a video game designed to increase empathy produces behaviorally-relevant, functional neural changes in fewer than 6 hours of gameplay in adolescents.

* This work was supported by a Gates Foundation grant OPP1033728 to RJD, and a core grant to the Waisman Center from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) P30 HD003352 to Marsha Seltzer.

Making a game to compliment a television property is an interesting challenge. Making a game to complement a television property that's also still in development is more challenging still! The team behind an in-development game being co-developed by Twin Cities PBS and Filament Games will talk about some of the ups and down of development of an educational game tied to an up and coming transmedia property.

LIVE EVENT - Participate and/or observe as an Astronomy 101 instructor and a group of students engage in the cycle of learning through implementation of a video game for learning. As the instructor teaches and the students play, Gear Learning’s SPROCKET, an in-game data analytics platform, will be hard at work in helping the instructor understand where students may be struggling with complex astronomy concepts. From instruction to gameplay to data visualization to feedback, this is your chance to see the entire process in action.

The Fair Play game provides players with the opportunity to take the perspective of Jamal Davis, a Black graduate student on his way to becoming a renowned professor. In this game, players experience racial bias during interactions with other characters, as well as in the virtual environment. As Jamal, the road to success involves navigating the academic world; as a Black student, bias can steer you off of a successful path. Winning in Fair Play involves learning when and how to name biases. While many will succeed in Fair Play, the true winners are those that learn the reality of bias. The game involves taking on the challenges of graduate student while also learning when, how or if to name biases. Typically played as a part of a workshop, players learn about and identify biases through the game and gain strategies for addressing and counteracting biases in academic settings.

In this session, designers, researchers and educators from BrainPop and Field Day will facilitate a hands-on workshop of playing and critiquing learning games. You will get a peek behind the curtain of how BrainPop assesses games, develop your own rubric, then apply that rubric to some free online games we will play and discuss during the session. By the end you will leave with some new ways to describe and judge the value of a game for your students.

The UW–Madison School of Education will be offering a new Game Design Certificate for undergraduate students starting in Fall 2018! This session will describe our goals, what game design entails, how students can enroll in the certificate program, and answer any questions you may have about the brand new program!

A well executed transmedia project expands a property’s world to multiple platforms while building connections between them through the various characters, settings, and narratives.  However, when building a brand new world, changes to these elements can have a huge impact on those connections and can radically impact development. Join the Twin Cities PBS team as we look at the development of educational games for the new K-2 PBS KIDS property “Hero Elementary”. We will discuss a few games and the collaborative development behind them as case studies for what went well, what did not, and lessons learned.