教育经历

Ph.D. Computer Science, 2004 — 2008

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Thesis: Culturally-Relevant Persuasive Technology

Established persuasive technology strategies grounded in cross-cultural psychology research, designed and developed two persuasive video games to educate players about quitting smoking based on those strategies. Evaluation using quantitative and qualitative analyses showed that both games had a significant effect.

 

B.Sc. Hons. Computer Science 2002

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Thesis: Aspect-Oriented Visualisation

Investigated the capacities of AspectJ for software visualisation, developed a small- scale visualisation framework for Java programs using AspectJ.

 

B.Sc. Computer Science 1999 – 2001

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

Computer science courses included software design, algorithms, database theory, computer networking, artificial intelligence, and programming languages. Courses outside of computer science included French and Logic, both pursued to 300-level.

 

代表性成果

Lead game designer in two large-scale EU FP7 projects: 2010 – 2013, 2012 – 2015

2010 – 2013 I served as lead designer on the award-winning conflict-resolution learning game Village Voices, which merged postcognitivist theories of learning with advanced game technology. 2012 – 2015 I served as lead game designer on the game Words Matter, a game that teaches literacy skills to players with dyslexia. Words Matter is being rolled out nationwide in Malta as part of the “one tablet per child” initiative.

 

Director of Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre at Concordia University

2017-2019, June 2020-onwards.

I served as director for the TAG Research Centre.

TAG is Canada’s oldest, largest, and most interdisciplinary games research centre, and has 73 members: 18 faculty members, and 55 graduate and postdoc members. While I am currently on maternity leave, I will resume directorship in June 2020

 

FRQSC research-creation grant on Speculative Play, 2016 – 2020

I lead a research-creation grant titled Speculative Play. This project concerns exploring, experimenting with, and capturing how speculative design drawing on playful interactivity can be brought to objects and experiences. The objectives of the project include refining speculative design knowledge through research- creation, examining what happens when playfully interactive speculative design is released in the wild, and developing soft criteria for what it means for speculative design to be impactful.

 

Critical Hit Parallax summer school between Concordia University and Indienova,

2018 – ongoing

Under my direction, TAG has established a biannual indie game design summer school — Critical Hit Parallax — for Chinese students in collaboration with the Chinese game portal Indienova. The school is a key instance of Concordia’s initiative to develop collaborations with China, it is a source of work experience for TAG graduate students, and also generates revenue to support TAG overhead costs.

 

其它