VEENA VASUDEVAN

Making Games for Learning

Over the last two and a half years, a significant portion of my research work has been related to game design for learning. I do this work under the auspices of my research assistantship work with Dr. Yasmin Kafai at UPenn GSE. Four our research, I have designed and facilitated several workshops for middle and high school aged youth, that always include a Scratch component and more recently, different ways to integrate tangible design with game design.

Recently, Penn News came to learn a little more about a partnership we have with a local middle school. Here is the print piece and here's the short video. In a later post, I'd like to reflect more deeply on another aspect of this experience - the use of visuality to bring some of this work to life and what it felt like to be in front of the camera versus behind it. As I think more seriously about incorporating visual methods into my own research work I was again struck by how nerve racking being on camera can be, especially initially. Thankfully in a room full of students and with many goals for the day, the nervousness melted away for the most part but it gave me pause and reminded me of all the rich discussions we have had in the past about reflexivity and what it means to do participant observation on film. More on this soon.