Abstract:

The Embodied Games Lab specializes in both creating and efficacy testing educational XR content. The opportunities for researching STEM education with immersive Virtual Reality (VR) have grown tremendously over the past three years. High resolution, stand-alone headsets are now affordable for many classrooms. Soon, teachers will ask, �Where is the quality educational content?� We need to start creating those experiences now. Many instructors and technologists want to move past the gaze-only style of mobile, non-interactive VR. The new generation of interactive hand controls allows learners to be very active and embodied as they manipulate content - in VR especially. The talk will describe and give examples of a set of 17 best practices in VR. Additionally, not all phenomena should be re-envisioned in 3D. It is expensive, and can perhaps be overwhelming; the sense of �presence� created by IVR is profound and immediate. This talk will also focus on which phenomena should be chosen. It will highlight how to use the body and gestures to interact with mediated content, and methods for embedding assessment into content. These sorts of embedded and game-like assessments can help teachers understand if the learner is really comprehending, or simply �going through the motions�.

Biography:

Dr. Johnson-Glenberg is a Research Professor at Arizona State University in the Psychology department. She is also an entrepreneur who is the Founder/President of the award-winning learning technology company called Embodied Games. Her ASU spin-out company creates, researches, and distributes innovative virtual and mixed reality (XR) educational content for 4th graders through life-long learners. As a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, she cut her teeth on designing software to remediate dyslexia in primary school children. For the past decade, she has led both a research lab and a small company in designing and producing STEM education games and simulations. She has a varied background as a screenwriter, experimental psychologist, and psychometrician; these disparate skills serve her well in leading a creative game design team dedicated to creating efficacious content. She presents nationally and internationally, and she has published in multiple peer-reviewed journals. Her most recent publication on VR and STEM education can be found in Frontiers in Robotics and AI https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2018.00081.
The Embodied Games lab has been at the forefront of creating �embodied� and kinesthetically-active games using sensors and joint-tracking technologies. Because the majority of Dr. Johnson-Glenberg�s games have been federally funded, they can be downloaded and played for free at www.embodied-games.com.