Tom Satwicz

Blink UX · UX Research

This paper reviews three classic theorists’ writing on games, learning, and development. Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner all wrote about games and play as important to thinking and learning. This review attempts to synthesize their perspectives as a means to revisit underused theoretical perspectives on the role of games in education. The views of Pia...

This paper reviews three classic theorists' writing on games, learning, and development. Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner all wrote about games and play as important to thinking and learning. This review attempts to synthesize their perspectives as a means to revisit underused theoretical perspectives on the role of games in education. The views of Pia...

This paper explores the role of technologies in supporting informal science learning from seven perspectives. Together, the authors ask a common question: How can learning technologies---tools, spaces, and places---be designed to support learners within and across environments? Eight exemplars are offered to answer this question through an analysis...

This paper describes the use of quantities in video games by young people as part of a broader effort to understand thinking and learning across naturally occurring contexts of activity. Our approach to investigating the use of quantities in game play is ethnographic; we have followed eight children over a six-month period as they play their own ga...

In this poster I use findings from an ethnographic analysis of young people's video gaming practices to approach an educational design problem. Three categories of practices are identified as a starting point for design principles informing a new virtual environment that simulates school practices. The intended purpose of the environment is to prov...

This paper describes an individual's role in coordinating a distributed system for learning. The analysis deals with a core issue for CSCL; the mismatch between common measures for learning, which are based on individual traits and outcomes, and learning processes that are distributed across people and artifacts. Rather than bridge this mismatch th...

This paper describes an individual's role in coordinating a distributed system for learning. The analysis deals with a core issue for CSCL; the mismatch between common measures for learning, which are based on individual traits and outcomes, and learning processes that are distributed across people and artifacts. Rather than bridge this mismatch th...

In this poster we explore the question of why, over time, a "learning technology" diffused and acquired new users in a university community (Rogers, 1995). Our approach contrasts two types of explanations for diffusion. The first one---largely implicit in much learning sciences research---is the view that diffusion happens because new users recogni...