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Katie is a Professor in the School of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University, and former Director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, a research center focused on emerging trends in design and media. She locates her work in the field of game design and serves as the Executive Director of a non-profit called the Institute of Play that is focused on games and learning. Katie led the team that founded Quest to Learn in 2009, a 6-12th grade public school in New York City, and is helping to remix the model in Chicago at a new charter school called ChicagoQuest. Katie is co-author of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, The Game Design Reader, Quest to Learn: Growing a School for Digital Kids, and editor of The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, all from MIT Press. She has worked as a game designer for over 10 years and is a former co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media. She was an early advocate of the then-hidden world of machinima and continues to be interested in connections between game design, learning, and transformative modes of play.

 Institute of Play

I really like this graphic and the idea of viewing the things we can create in a game -- either as part of the game, as in Farmville, or as Machinima, as in Halo. The section this particular page is from, the "Games As" guides, has some interesting creativity-sparking ways of looking at games and using games in education. It doesn't start and end with just playing the game. In a way, this sort of exploration might be similar to the advanced reading Mortimer Adled espouses in "How to Read a Book." By that I mean that, just as reading a book can be done on many levels, so can playing a game. The more you explore a book or game, the more you get out of it and the more you truly learn from it.

Good article about a game where Algebra is stealthily taught. I've played it myself and love it. But I have questions: Is it really learning if you don't understand the reason for the rules? Does that matter when you first start, or is it better to just play first and learn rules implicitly. And how well does this translate to equation solving without the hints and prompts? It's early days yet, but this game is certainly interesting and fun.