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Alex Chisholm
Advisor
Alex Chisholm is a media research and development consultant who creates transmedia entertainment and educational properties. in recent years, he has developed and managed several projects with NBC Universal, including iCue with NBC News, and the online games for NBC Olympics. Chisholm is a founding member of the Learning Games Network, a non-profit organization that aims to support innovation in the design and use of games for learning, and serves as the Software and Video Gaming Judge for the National Parenting Publication Awards (NAPPA). Over the past 10 years, Chisholm has collaborated on research, product, and program development with Microsoft, Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures Imageworks, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, Children's Hospital Boston, and the Hewlett and MacArthur Foundations. He holds a B.S. from Cornell University.
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Kristina Drzaic
Affilliate
As an undergraduate Drzaic pursued a major in film because she found the combination of narrative and image a compelling way to transmit ideas. She is interested in how media presents an image, how it sustains an audience, and what makes it memorable. During her undergraduate years Drzaic produced an award-winning film and numerous video shorts. Additionally her interests led her to write and publish an undergraduate thesis exploring how the un-winnable electronic game might sustain game play through the framework of early cinema history. While at CMS Drzaic has continued her research on un-winnable games, game secrets and game-breaking. This past winter break Drzaic led the winning team in the 2006 Sony IAP Workshop with a game focusing on the experience of being a National Geographic photographer. Currently she is engaged in designing mobile math games for the Education Arcade.
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James Paul Gee
Advisor
James Paul Gee, formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in linguistics in 1975 from Stanford University and has published widely in linguistics and education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the “New Literacies Studies”, an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades. His most recent books both deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003) offers 36 reasons why good video games produce better learning conditions than many of today’s schools. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His new book, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul, shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and have the capacity to empower people.
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Eitan Glinert
Student Affiliate
Eitan Glinert is a Master's of Engineering student working with the MIT Teacher Education Program and the MIT/Singapore Alliance. His is currently designing a new audio-based video game that will be accessable to the visually impaired. Before joining TEP he was the project coordinator for the educational video game Immune Attack, being developed at the Federation of American Scientists. He has also worked in France for the biotechnology startup Modul-Bio as a software developer, creating laboratory information management systems, and has held research internships at MIT’s Bioinstrumentation Engineering Analysis and Microscopy laboratory and MIT’s Artificial Intelligence laboratory. Eitan received a B.S. from MIT in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and holds a minor in Biology. |
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Jason Haas
Affiliate
Jason is a Research Associate in TEA, affiliated with the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. His research focuses on an educational media product being developed by NBC News. His interests include media, collaboration, learning, information flow, and the workings of large organizations. Recent projects include the multimedia variety show The Wasteland Comedy Hour with T.S. Eliot, almost-live improvised video troupe Neutrino, the distributed network, international rock band The Man Who Was Thursday, and the Internet radio drama, The Chagoon Conspiracy. He holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Wesleyan University, and a M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Technology, Innovation and Education program. |
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Henry Jenkins
Advisor
Henry Jenkins is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of nine books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His forthcoming books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. Jenkins writes monthly columns on media and cultural change for Technology Review Online and Computer Games magazine. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games. He was also one of the principal investigators on a collaboration with Initiative Media to monitor audience response to American Idol with an eye towards developing new approaches to audience measurement. Jenkins has a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Eric Klopfer
Director
Eric Klopfer is the Director of the MIT Teacher Education Program (http://education.mit.edu) and the Scheller Career Development Professor of Science Education and Educational Technology at MIT. The Teacher Education Program prepares MIT undergraduates to become math and science teachers. Klopfer's research focuses on the development and use of computer games and simulations for building understanding of science and complex systems. His research explores simulations and games on desktop computers as well as handhelds. He currently runs the StarLogo ( http://education.mit.edu/starlogo) project, a desktop platform that enables students and teachers to create computer simulations of complex systems. He is also the creator of StarLogo TNG, a new platform for helping kids create 3D simulations and games using a graphical programming language. On handhelds, Klopfer's work includes Participatory Simulations (http://education.mit.edu/pda ), which embed users inside of complex systems, and Augmented Reality simulations (http://education.mit.edu/ar), which create a hybrid virtual/real space for exploring intricate scenarios in real time. He is the co-director of The Education Arcade, which is advancing the development and use of games in K-12 education. Klopfer's work combines the construction of new software tools with research and development of new pedagogical supports that support the use of these tools in the classroom. He is the co-author of the book, "Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo," and is working on a new book on handheld games and learning from MIT Press.
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Lan Xuan Le
Student Affiliate
Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the “games for health movement,” conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore’s McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program’s top writing prize.
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Marleigh Norton
Affiliate
Marleigh Norton is a research manager for the Teacher Education Program and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. A recent addition to the MIT staff, Marleigh brings years of design experience from both the commercial and academic sectors. Her recent work as an interaction designer for the Waterford Research Institute aimed to teach reading, math, and science to young children through the use of educational games. She holds a master’s degree in human-computer interaction from Georgia Tech, where she created an augmented reality 3-D puzzle game. New interaction paradigms are a major interest of hers, and past projects have included collaborative touch-screens for the NASA Ames Research Center and voice user interfaces for major telephone companies.
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Scot Osterweil
Creative Director
Scot directs, and leads the design on a number of projects in TEA, including Labyrinth, Caduceus, and iCue. Before coming to MIT, Scot was the Senior Designer at TERC, where he designed Zoombinis Island Odyssey, winner of the 2003 Bologna New Media Prize, and the latest game in the Zoombinis line of products (Riverdeep/TLC). Scot is the creator of the Zoombinis, and with Chris Hancock he co-designed the multi-award winning Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and its first sequel, Zoombinis Mountain Rescue. Scot is the also the designer of the TERCworks games Switchback, and Yoiks!, the latter also with Chris Hancock. Other software design work includes InspireData (Inspriration Software) and its predecessors Tabletop, and Tabletop Jr. Previously, Scot worked in television production and theater. He is a graduate of Yale College.
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Judy Perry
Affiliate
Judy is Research Manager of the MIT Teacher Education Program. She currently oversees design, development and research for several projects involving games and simulations for handheld devices, including location-based Augmented Reality projects (http://education.mit.edu/ar), and Participatory Simulations (http://education.mit.edu/pda), such as Palmagotchi. Prior to becoming a researcher at MIT, her work included television and web production, and content development for educational toys. She holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University, and an Ed. M. in Technology in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Ravi Purushotma
Affiliate
Ravi is a graduate of the Comparative Media Studies M.S. program, where he worked as a researcher on their New Media Literacies projects. Formerly a student in the UCLA Teaching English as a Second Language program and English teacher in southern China, his interests are in how foreign language learning will need to be re conceptualized to take advantage of the instantaneous access to foreign culture and media available with today's technologies.
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Alice J. Robison
Affiliate
Alice J. Robison (Ph.D. 2006, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where she specializes in literacy and new media, especially videogames. In addition to her work with The Education Arcade, Alice is a consultant for several new media initiatives, including the MacArthur Foundation-backed New Media Literacies Project (http://projectnml.org). She also teaches courses on videogame analysis and new media literacies while advising several student-run groups devoted to the study of videogames and interactive media. In her spare time Alice enjoys independent rock music, political punditry, videogaming, and Web 2.0 culture. She is also a devoted fan of her pug dog, Annie.
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Eric Rosenbaum
Student Affilliate
Eric Rosenbaum is a research manager at the MIT Teacher Education Program. He works on handheld location-based simulation games, and on StarLogo TNG, a graphical programming environment for making simulations and games. His other projects include making curriculum with molecular dynamics simulations, and creating animations for music education. He holds an A.B in Psychology from Harvard University, and an M.Ed. in Technology in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Dan Roy
Affilliate
Daniel Roy spends his free time singing with the MIT a capella group Resonance, and watching projected TV on the wall of the CMS grad lounge from the amazing new couch. When Roy isn't slacking off, he takes various classes and works with The Education Arcade, where he is designing a series of games to teach math and literacy in middle schools. In Fall 2005, Muzzy Lane Software released a commercial educational game that Roy helped develop: "Making History: The Calm & The Storm." At CMS, Roy modified another commercial game (Grim Fandango) with Ravi Purushotma (06) to teach Spanish, a project which they presented at the Game Developers Conference in Spring 2006. During the fall semester, Roy also helped develop an Augmented Reality game with the Teacher Education Program and attended the Serious Games Summit. His current thesis topic involves plagiarizing Raph Koster's "A Theory of Fun for Game Design" without his advisor finding out.
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Lauren Silberman
Student Affilliate
Lauren Silberman graduated with a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2007), where she also spent four years as a research assistant in the Games, Learning, and Society program. Using commercial sport video games as a model, her core research investigates how sport video games mediate athletes' physical play. She has observed and interviewed numerous professional and college level athletes about their virtual game-play. Her research has been published in The Journal of Physical Education and she has presented her research in various forums throughout the United States and abroad. She has worked for NBC and other leading media companies as a researcher and project assistant. Outside the video game arena, Lauren is on the Jimmy Fund Council where she helps raise money for Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
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Kurt Squire
Advisor
Kurt Squire is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction. 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, 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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Philip Tan
Affilliate
Philip Tan is the executive director for the Cambridge operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a multi-year game innovationinitiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore and a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). Prior to his current position, he worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a live DJ crew at MIT.
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Evan Wendel
Student Affilliate
Evan Wendel graduated with a BS in physics from Hobart College in 2004, and calls media studies his driving passion. He is attracted to CMS because of its attention to the critical study of games (where he has an interest in MMORPGs) and the opportunity to balance theory and practice. Since graduating, Evan has spent time traveling throughout the US, particularly along the West Coast, spending his free time as a practicing digital artist. Just prior to joining CMS he worked as a software technician at Xerox debugging code for developmental software. Evan's specific interests include thinking through virtual communities and issues of self-regulation, as well as the culture of democracy, especially as they relate to game architectures. He also has a strong interest in the concept of informed citizenry, its purpose(s) in a democratic society, and the impact new media technologies employed by various news media are having in these areas. While at CMS he hopes to focus on the following question: Can MMORPGs or similar games with community-based interactions be designed such that players would be simultaneously entertained, educated, and engaged in civic debate and interaction? He is eager to bring his mix of technical geekdom, artistic achievement, and critical thinking to the table.
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