9:00 am to Noon  •  Armory 151A TECH HUB

The Tech Hub will be open in the morning for people to get playful with emerging technologies – VR and AR games, 3D printed tokens, Esports demos, and general Symposium information.

9:00 am to 9:50 am  •  Armory 147

DESIGN BRANCH - Designing for Play in the CU Community

• Board Game Community of Champaign-Urbana

Presenter: Kaity Bequette and Andrew Stengele

Whether you're new to game design or a seasoned professional, a supportive community can help you and your designs! Find out about the very active board game design community right here in Champaign-Urbana including programs like CUDO Plays, groups like CUBED and tons of board game groups that get together just to play games! In these groups, designers help one another by providing a outlet for stress, sharing information and resources, offering feedback an commiseration and when asked friendly critique.

• Adventure Play for the Future

Presenter: Kelsey Langley

This talk will explore adventure playgrounds, recounting their history in Europe and the new adventure playground movement in the US- of which CU has a nationally leading program. Special focus will be given to Playwork philosophy which is a supportive, player-centric model of interaction which is broadly applicable. We will share stories of the success of this model with photos from local programs.

9:00 am to 9:50 am  •  Armory 148

PEDAGOGY BRANCH - Laying Groundwork for Today’s Conversations

• Hailing the Whole Student in a Fragmented Academy

Moderator: Dan Steward.
Presenters: Leon Liebenberg and Judith Pintar

Judith Pintar and Leon Liebenberg will share their experiences with playful pedagogies that simultaneously engage students in literature, engineering, systems-thinking, graphics, coding, design-thinking, role-playing, and meta-cognition. Their examples will prompt a larger discussion of the ways we teachers may guide our students through learning that challenges and rewards the whole person, whilst being enjoyable. Panel is co-sponsored by the LAS Teaching academy

9:00 am to 9:50 am  •  Armory 172

TECHNOLOGY BRANCH - Morning Tech Talks

• Image2speech: Software that tries to generate spoken descriptions of images

Presenter: Mark A. Hasegawa-Johnson

Imagine having a conversation with your phone, trying to find a new jacket. Your phone downloads a few thousand pictures, clusters them, and starts describing features to you. Shoulders: puffy, straight, or sleeveless? The training paradigm is really a straightforward application of neural machine translation, but instead of translating from English to French, we are translating from image features to speech sounds. By translating directly to speech, I am prototyping the idea that spoken-language computer interface can exist in languages that don’t even have a standardized writing system. But how do you evaluate an image2speech system? Objective measures just won’t work: there are too many different ways you can describe an image. Subjective evaluation is probably necessary. Since the target application is entertainment (on-line shopping and the like), the best evaluation scenario will probably be, itself, some form of entertainment, that recruits users by being fun to play.

• Gaming and Landscape Architecture Design: A Game Model Based on the University of Illinois Campus

Presenter: Litong Zeng

Most people think of landscape architecture as backyards and parks, with trees and flowers, but it is much more than that, as a field of study deeply rooted in spatial connections between humans and the material systems around them. In this brief talk, I will explain a game structure I developed through my thesis research in Landscape architecture based on the University of Illinois campus, this game suggests new possibilities for landscape architecture as a practice of design aimed at negotiating relationships, by allowing users to re-negotiate and connect with the physical environment around them.

• Crowdsourced Playful Digital Accessibility @ UIUC

Presenter: Lawrence Angrave

In the quest for Digital Accessibility, UIUC online video lectures can be automatically machine-transcribed, translated and captioned by ClassTranscribe (a UIUC project). Using crowd-sourcing techniques, students fix errors in the automatic transcriptions. In this presentation and discussion, we ask firstly, how we can use playful techniques to encourage and reward students to fix transcription and translation errors. Secondly, are there legal, pedagogical, social and societal implications to playful crowdsourced solutions?

10:00 am to 10:50 am  •  Armory 147

DESIGN BRANCH - Designing for Adventurous Play in the CU Community

• Escape Room Round Table

Presenters: Anne Lukeman and Chris Lukeman from CU Adventures in Space and Time, Paul Kwiat from LabEscape, and Ursulla Clague and Xavier Scott from Brainstorm Escapes

Escape rooms have become exceedingly popular in the last few years, and not just to gamers. Hear local escape room owners discuss challenges and opportunities when designing escape room game - and share what they’ve learned. Come with questions!

10:00 am to 10:50 am  •  Armory 386

PEDAGOGY BRANCH - Incorporating play into the humanities and social sciences

• Speculative futures and interactive narratives to promote social change

Organizer: Monica Porteanu

The Speculative Futures group invites Playful by Design to join them in their monthly meeting. In this playful workshop, attendees will explore interactive speculative futures as a research method.

10:00 am to 10:50 am  •  Armory 172

TECHNOLOGY BRANCH - VR in the Classroom

• Virtual Archaeology

Presenter: Laura Shackelford Assisted by: Cameron Merrill, Allie Zachwieja, Issac Smith

We discuss the development and delivery of a virtual reality (VR) archaeology course and the potential for VR in social sciences learning environments. We present the design of an immersive, interactive, virtual archaeology course for undergraduate students using the HTC Vive, a room-scale, virtual reality platform, and Unreal Engine 4, an open-source gaming engine. In Spring 2019, Virtual Archaeology was delivered as an undergraduate, general education course to relieve the burden of archaeological field school, which many students cannot accommodate for financial or logistical reasons. The course was designed to teach archaeological theory and field methods using a virtual excavation experience and game-based learning strategies

• Virtual Reality and the Humanities Classroom

Presenter: Andrew Wilson

Dr. Andrew Wilson, a teaching associate at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School, will demonstrate some of the approaches that he has developed in his own courses and discuss the practical application of design and VR-inflected pedagogy in the humanities classroom, emphasizing the importance of student-centered learning strategies. He will highlight a project in which his students created digital facsimiles of historical artifacts from the ancient world.

• Exploring Virtual Reality En Français

Presenter: Amy Clay

Virtual reality headsets have great potential to provide rich, immersive, and culturally contextualized information for foreign language learning. This presentation describes the implementation of Occulus Go headsets in French language courses, specifically using Wander, a 3D map application. Affordances and challenges are discussed along with implications for future directions.

• The Future of Virtual Reality Enhanced Task-Based Language Teaching

Presenter: Alexander Burkel

I will be presenting a Doctoral project I am currently working on which involves the use of a Virtual Reality (VR) headset to immerse French learners in more authentic and meaningful contexts in their French language acquisition process, allowing them to make better use of the French two past-tense contrasts.

11:00 am to 11:50 am  •  Armory 147

DESIGN BRANCH - Libraries as Spaces for Design

• Creating a Cross-disciplinary Hub for Active Student Learning in the EIU Library

Moderator: David Ward. Panelists: Zach Newell, Newton Key, Todd Bruns, Stacey Knight-Davis, CC Wharram,
Steve Brantley,

Booth Library at Eastern Illinois University is creating a Student Development & Innovation Center, converting an underutilized space in the library into a flexible active learning environment that encourages creativity and play. This embodies ideas of an “artscience” lab, engaging students in experiential learning through the pursuit of innovative dreams.

11:00 am to 11:50 am  •  Armory 134

PEDAGOGY BRANCH - Playful Environments for Learning

• New Classrooms; New Teaching Opportunities

Presenter: Ava Wolf

Recent initiatives including newly developed iFLEX categories for General Assignment classrooms, and the upcoming Campus Instructional Facility will offer faculty a wider variety of active learning classrooms to choose from, and provide more opportunities for student interaction and enjoyment in the classroom. Get ready to enhance your teaching in classrooms designed to support active and collaborative learning!

• TIER-ED – A College of Education Initiative

Presenter: Tabassum Amina

The talk will highlight the vision and goals of TIER-ED, current achievements, and what are the immediate plans for the coming year.

• Rethinking Art and Design Studios: Video Games as an Alternative Suggestion

Presenter: Ahu Yolac

Comparing gaming and art and design studio environments in terms of active learning, peer to peer learning and motivation in order to suggest video games’ potential in art and design education.

11:00 am to 11:50 am  •  Armory 172

TECHNOLOGY BRANCH - Potentials in Biofeedback Technologies 

• Talking Biofeedback Games - The Culture and Mechanics of The Journey to The Wild Divine Game Series

Presenter: Kiel Gilleade and David Hopping

Released in 2003, The Journey to the Wild Divine: The Passage was a game that trained players how to relax through biofeedback techniques . Combining Myst like gameplay and New Age thought, players explored the mysterious Sun Realm and encountered assorted mini-games that would respond to their physiology and teach them how to control these signals in order to better control their emotions. In this session we explore the culture and mechanics behind The Passage and other games in the Wild Divine series and discuss how biofeedback loops can be integrated into gameplay mechanics. As part of this session, we will also have several Wild Divine games setup for the audience to experience biofeedback games.