BIOGRAPHY

As a Ph.D. candidate in the Education department at UC Berkeley and a Media Developer at the Lawrence Hall of Science, Coe Leta has been researching educational technology since 2000 and has designed more than a dozen educational interactives. She was a lead technology designer of "Nanozone," a museum exhibition and website on nanotechnology that launched in 2005. Her professional background includes usability research at Macromedia, web and graphic design, and activity development for the Tech Museum of Innovation. Her current work focuses on social learning theory and the design of collaborative educational games for informal settings. While she'll happily play any game with anybody, anytime, there's only one game she loves to play alone - DDR double mode!

ABSTRACT

Principles to Practice - Ed Tech Design Challenge
Workshop, Thursday (1:30 - 3:00) in Hall of Ideas E

Utilizing design principles from game and education practices, participants in this session will engage in an educational technology design challenge.

Design is a series of trade-offs. Designing educational activities that intrinsically motivate users and support pedagogical goals requires designers to balance features that are at times contradictory. For example, highly engaging features may detract from learning goals. Similarly, a pedagogically-sound design may not be particularly engaging. From our work in designing tech-based educational activities for the museum, where learner's activity is voluntary, our team has explored issues of design from both an educational perspective and a game/play perspective. We routinely draw upon design practices from the videogame industry and the learning sciences community. Our design process includes formative evaluation and iterative design with our users. An on-going goal of our team is to provide other practitioners with principles that are informed by theory and tested in practice.

One of the recent challenges faced by our team was to develop a brief activity to educate kids on the motivations and interests of scientists. Participants of this session will propose solutions to this same challenge by learning about general design principles and engaging in a grounded exploration of how these principles apply to the practice of design. We will conclude this session with a presentation of two drastically different designs that our team developed and tested with our audience.