Symposium Participants – 2019

 

Ahu Yolac is a PhD student in Art Education who studies the pedagogical potentials of gaming spaces and environments, specifically, how the virtual and physical bodies of gamers, gaming spaces and identities serve as a communication bridge for informal learning.

Alexander Burkel has a double Masters in Teaching French, and English as a Second Language, and is currently completing his PhD in SLATE. His main fields of interest are technology and language acquisition. Over the past 4 years he has been working closely with the latest in Virtual Reality technology researching the best ways to bridge those two fields in ways that will benefit language learning in the classroom setting.

Alexis Kim is a PhD student in Informatics, working on the use of Interactive Fiction for language learning. She is an administrative assistant for Playful by Design in 2018-2019.

Allen Turner teaches game design at the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media. He is a Black/Lakota/Irish game designer, storyteller, artist, dancer, author, and performer who believes in the power of play and story as fundamental, powerful medicines that shape our sense of self, relationships, and our connection to the cosmos. A 20-year veteran of the video games industry, he has worked on projects at Bungie Software (Myth, Myth II, Oni), Day 1 Studios (MechAssault), Wideload Games (Stubbs the Zombie, Hail to the Chimp), Marvel Comics and Disney Interactive Studios (Disney’s Guilty Party, Marvel XP).

Amy Clay is a faculty member in the Department of French and Italian and directs the French Basic Language Program, where she is currently working on using virtual reality technology to create rich contexts for language learning and enhance student learning experiences.

Andrew Stengele is a member of several CU design organizations and initiatives including CUDO plays, Champaign Movie Makers and Pens to Lens. He is also the leader Of CUBED – the Champaign Urbana Boardgame Designers and Engineers.

Anne Lukeman is co-owner, with Chris Lukeman, of the Escape Room CU Adventures in Time and Space. She is a former video professional who is passionate about storytelling
and gaming.

Ava Wolf currently works at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning and is interested in reimagining the classroom through the design and development of learning environments that promote active engagement and improved learning outcomes.

Brian Traficante is the Creative Director at DSVolition.

Caleb Wilson is a writer of interactive fiction and of conventional fiction. He has written free IF such as Lime Ergot, commercial IF such as Cannonfire Concerto, and his first book, Polymer, was recently published by Eraserhead Press.

Cameron Merrill is a third year PhD candidate in Computer Science studying human computer interaction, virtual reality and cybersecurity. He is the lead technical artist, project manager, and programmer for the virtual experiences used in Anth 399, Virtual Archaeology, using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

CC Wharram is Professor of English and Director of Eastern Illinois University’s Center for the Humanities. His research focuses on translation studies, Romantic and Gothic literature, and the intersections between literature, philosophy, and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His scholarship puts the humanities, translation, and technological advances into conversation, to which his recent essays “Nothing Human” in Educational Theory (October 2014) and “‘A Proper Contagion’: The Inoculation Narrative and the Immunological Turn” in the collection Transforming Contagion (Rutgers UP, 2018) testify. He also has a new translation of Goethe’s The Passion of Young Werther forthcoming with Broadview Press.

Chris Klimas is a web developer, writer, and game designer based in Baltimore, Maryland. He created the interactive fiction authoring platform Twine in 2009. He is a member of the board of directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation. He teaches game design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Chris Lukeman is co-owner, with Anne Lukeman, of the Escape Room CU Adventures in Time and Space. Chris and Anne design and run immersive live-action escape room games for thousands of players a year in Champaign-Urbana.

Conor Minnaugh is senior in political science and the coordinator of the DotA 2 community and coach of the DotA 2 team. He loves history documentaries and studying new cultures. He also plans to go into teaching English in Japan after graduation to gain experience in East Asia. Upon returning, he hopes to work for the state department.

Dan Cermak is leaning on 30 years of experience in the Video Game Industry to teach Top Down Video Game Design at UIUC. For 15 years he was at Volition, a video game company in Champaign, where he held the GM role for 6 years. He currently a faculty member in Informatics at UIUC where he teaches game design, and is playing a key role in developing game studies programs on this campus.

Dan Steward is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, where he uses a variety of playful pedagogies to teach sociological ideas. He has been the Director of the LAS Teaching Academy for the last two years.

David Dubin is a Teaching Associate Professor at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences. His research interests include the ontology of games and other creative works, and he teaches a class on developing game-related programs for libraries.

David Hopping is the webmaster for the Electronic Literatures & Literacies Lab and Playful by Design. He teaches web design for the School of Information Science.

David Koruna is the current President of Illini Esports. Last year he was the competitive Vice President. He is in his senior year and will be graduating in May with a BS in Statistics. Besides video gaming, in his spare time, he enjoys cooking.

David Ward is the Head of the Undergraduate Library at the University of Illinois, and the director of the Undergraduate Library Gaming Collection.

David Marchant is Professor of the Practice, Dance, Performing Arts Department on the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis. He is the co-director of Co-Artistic Director of ZoMotion Arts with his wife, Holly Seitz Marchant, performing site-specific installations in natural environments, including tree-climbing as dance art form. In addition to his work as a choreographic artist, David is a recognized professional improvisational composer and performer, including contact improvisation, and has performed with notable artists such as Kirstie Simson, Andrew Harwood and Chris Aiken.

Duncan Baird is an undergraduate student in Computer Science currently working as an Assistant Manager for the Champaign Urbana Community Fab Lab. He spends his time making costumes from games and animations and periodically teaching kids how to make video games.

Eileen Feng is a senior in Earth, Society, and Environmental Sustainability. For the past 2 years, she has been the Vice President of Community for Illini Esports. Outside of her passion for collegiate esports, she enjoys cooking, playing badminton, and playing games with friends. She also loves to travel to different countries and explore other cultures.

Helen Wauck is a PhD candidate studying Human-Computer Interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois. Her research investigates how to design video games that are effective at training students’ spatial reasoning skills – skills that are one of the strongest predictors of future success in STEM majors and STEM careers. During the first few years of her PhD, she oversaw the development of Homeworld Bound, a spatial skill training game for elementary school students. Currently, she is working to develop new spatial skill training games targeting the interests of low spatial skill students in particular. http://wauck2.web.engr.illinois.edu

Isaac Smith is a third year student in Computer Science + Anthropology with a focus on sociocultural anthropology.

Jamie Nelson works at the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning at the University of Illinois. He oversees operations of the TechHub (151A Armory), a hands-on emerging technology showcase open to the campus and the community alike. He also acts as Staff Advisor to Illini Esports. Jamie has been involved in gaming, mostly digital, since the late seventies and early eighties starting with such classics as Pong (Tandy) and Zork (Commodore 64). In more recent years he has “stayed in the game” playing the BioShock, Uncharted, and Fallout series. Most recently he’s picked up Fortnite.

Jeff Ginger is a Program Coordinator with the Illinois Informatics Institute and Adjunct Instructor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also the director of the CU Community Fab Lab where he promotes all three missions of the University of Illinois: public engagement, teaching and research.

John Parzynski is a Senior in Computer Science. He currently is the Community and Competitive Coordinator for the game Rainbow Six Siege. Being involved in Illini Esports has led him to make new friendships with others who enjoy similar games. Some of these games include Rainbow 6, PUBG, League of Legends, Destiny, Warframe and more. The joy of being a coordinator has also led him to be involved with helping plan many of the amazing events such as semester LANs, IE’s Learn to Siege event, and a tournament versus the Illinois State’s Rainbow Six team.

John Palmer is not only a hard-working student in Chemistry and Science of the Earth Systems, but John is also a player for Illini Esports’ Rainbow Six Siege Premier Team. His favorite genres are MOBA’s (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) and RPG’s (Role Playing Games), but his passion for video games will lead him to play nearly anything! He also loves showing people all the different things that video games have to offer, especially to people who aren’t really familiar with the concept of video games.

Judith Pintar is the co-director, with Randall Sadler, of the IPRH Playful by Design Research Cluster. She directs the Electronic Literatures & Literacies Lab for Illinois Informatics. She is a member of the faculty at Informatics and the School of Information Science, and teaches the design and programming of parser-based interactive fiction. She is on the national board of directors of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation where she chairs the Education Committee. https://el3.judithpintar.com/, https://judithpintar.com.

Kaity Bequette is the Operations Manager of the CUDO Plays Boardgame Design Competition and a member of the Champaign-Urbana Deisgn Organization (CUDO). While she helps represent the community branch of Playful by Design, she is a a graduate of the School of Information Science at UIUC and is now a staff member at the College of Engineering where she works as a Help Desk Specialist and Student Coordinator.

Kelsey Langley is the founder & executive director of KOOP Adventure Play where she creates environments ripe for all play types of the children she serves. You’ll find her outside rain or shine, probably making unique rope swings or supplying materials that inspire or help children bring their imaginations to life. Kelsey volunteers with groups like Urbana First Fridays and PechaKucha to provide community space for shared interests and playful experiences for all ages.

Kiel Gilleade is a Visiting Research Programmer at NCSA. He is working R&D in a range of brain and body controlled interactive experiences including computer games. http://justkiel.com

Kim Sheahan is the Assistant Director of Education at the Spurlock Museum. Her special interest is how folktales connect visitors to artifacts, and she serves as the Museum’s resident storyteller.

Kristen Allen has been the Illinois distributed Museum Coordinator for the past year and a half. Her job includes working with members of the campus community, including faculty, staff, and students to create content about innovations that have occurred on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus and thinking about how to improve user experience on the website. She is also a member of the leadership team for the Champaign-Urbana Emerging Museum Professionals.

Laura Shackelford is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Anatomy Director for the Carle Illinois College of Medicine. Her research explores virtual reality and technology in education in an effort to make human prehistory and archaeological field work accessible to more students.

Lawrence Angrave is a Computer Science Teaching Professor. He recently co-created the online CS course “Introduction to Game Design” and is running the Virtual Reality lab and course at Siebel Center. Prior to joining UIUC, he helped Sony launch the PS2 and helped UK and US game companies design and create games with realistic physical environments.

Leon Liebenberg leads the “Play-in-Learning: Cognition, Emotion, and Playful Pedagogy” strategic instructional innovation program in the College of Engineering. He has developed and presented novel courses and initiatives to promote whole-mind thinking and the use of play in technological problem-solving, including role-play, simulation, low-fidelity prototyping, and online design portfolios and graphic novels.

Lisa Bievenue is the Director of Informatics, an interdisciplinary unit hosted by the School of Information Science, and the campus home of the Playful by Design interdisciplinary game studies network. She serves as PbD’s financial officer.

Lisette Chapa leads Open Gaming Hours for Illini Esports. She excites the gaming community by throwing down tournaments with hilarious same-screen videogames! Lisette has been in love with gaming ever since she first played Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on her Nintendo 64. To this day she continues to play many first-person shooters, her favorite being Left 4 Dead. Besides being Social Gaming Lead, she is also one of the Technology Curator for the Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning Innovation Spaces. Lisette’s current passion for gaming has her fully immersive in virtual reality through the HTC VIVE.

Mark Hasegawa-Johnson is the author of about 300 peer-reviewed publications on audio, speech, and language processing, including a series of papers in the early 2000’s that popularized the recognition of rhythm as a standard component of automatic speech recognition. His work on under-resourced languages has been presented in Indonesia, India, Morocco, Taiwan, and Singapore. In 2017 he started developing spoken-language human computer interfaces for the three or four fifths of human languages that lack any standardized writing system.

Monica Porteanu is a PhD candidate in Design, Technology, and Society Informatics. Her research focuses on decision-making for the regenerative society, using futures studies, research-through-design, and data science methodologies. She has taught Interaction Design, New Media, at the School of Art + Design, and assisted in teaching Socio-Technical Information Systems and Entrepreneurial IT Design in the iSchool. Monica is the Champaign organizer of Speculative Futures, a chapter of the Design Futures Initiative.

Newton Key is the Director of the Faculty Development and Innovation Center and a History Professor at Eastern Illinois University. He has written books, articles and chapters on early modern England and the early modern blogosphere and has conference presentations on the same and on digital participation as well as geo-referencing in the classroom. http://ux1.eiu.edu/~nekey/key_vita.htm

Paul Kwiat is a Professor of Physics and also Director and originator of the LabEscape concept. LabEscape, a non-profit outreach project from the UIUC Dept of Physics, is the world’s only science-based escape room (though absolutely no science background is necessary to be successful). Our mission is to show people that science can be accessible, relevant, aesthetically beautiful, and fun!

Randall Sadler is the co-director, with Judith Pintar, of Playful by Design. He is a full professor of Linguistics and the Director of the ESL program. His research interest is in the pedagogies of virtual worlds.

Robert Baird is Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies in the College of Media and Associate Director in the Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, where he leads the Instructional Spaces & Technologies unit and the Pedagogy Strategy unit. He has taught a section on video gaming within his New Media courses at Illinois since the release of the PlayStation 1 and the Nintendo 64.

Stacey Knight-Davis is the Head of Library Technology Services at Booth Library, Eastern Illinois University. She is the library’s webmaster, application developer, and is involved in all library technology initiatives. She holds the degree of Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master’s in Technology from EIU. Scholarship: http://works.bepress.com/stacey_knight-davis/.

Steve Brantley is a Professor in Library Services and the Head of Research, Engagement and Scholarship at Booth Library. He has been teaching information literacy in higher education for 20 years. Steve is the Librarian for Communication Studies, Political Science and Television/Film/Media Studies. He has published in the areas of Scholarly Communication competencies for librarians, and information seeking behavior, and other library research-support topics. Selected works: https://works.bepress.com/steve_brantley/.

Stuart Moulthrop is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a member of the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the author of several notable projects in digital art and writing, including Victory Garden (1991), which Robert Coover called a “benchmark” for electronic fiction, and “Deep Surface” and “Under Language,” which in 2007 won Ciutat de Vinarós Prizes for narrative and poetry. His latest digital fiction, “Emaji Narratgee Marakka,” will be published by Wonderbox later this year. In 2012 Moulthrop and Professor Dene Grigar of Washington State University received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to launch Pathfinders, an ongoing effort to preserve the experience of early born-digital literature. Based on that research, Moulthrop and Grigar published Traversals: The Uses of Preservation for Early Electronic Literature (MIT Press, 2017).

Tabassum Amina is a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Technology Innovation in Educational Research and Design (TIER-ED) initiative. Her research focuses on online learning and identifying innovative ways to utilize online platforms for not only better access to information and knowledge but also more informed living and learning for the less privileged in developing countries.

Todd Bruns is an Associate Professor and Head of Scholarly Communication in Booth Library at Eastern Illinois University (EIU). His research interests include scholarly communication and publishing, open access, and active learning. Todd is the 2018-2019 Chair of EIU’s Faculty Senate, and currently teaches TEC5173: Global Technology in the EIU School of Technology. For more information, see his page https://works.bepress.com/todd_bruns/.

Zach Newell is Dean of Library Services at Eastern Illinois University. As part of his passion for shaping the future of the library, Zach continues to examine and reimagine the relationship the campus community has to the library and its space, and continues to cultivate the potential for cross-disciplinary collaboration. Zach was previously a Fulbright Scholar at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring. Zach holds a B.A. in Philosophy, an M.A. in Art History and an M.S. in Library Science. He is currently finishing his dissertation on creativity and information literacy at Simmons University in Boston, MA. https://works.bepress.com/zach-newell/

Zachary Pease is a senior in Mechanical Engineering. He is a coordinator that handles all things related to Hearthstone. He is dedicated to managing the competitive team. He also hosts Hearthstone Fireside Gatherings, where people play Hearthstone for fun, sometimes with crazy rules! Zach’s talent does not stop here! He also is a player for the Rainbow Six Siege Premier Team. Outside of Hearthstone and Siege, he plays a variety of other games, including Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, and Girls’ Frontline.