BIOGRAPHY

Matt Fishbach is an education technology designer who lives close to the source, currently teaching biology at Berkeley High School in northern California. He worked for nine years as a designer and senior producer at companies including Broderbund Software (the Carmen Sandiego series), The Learning Company, Mattel, and LeapFrog. He's a co-holder of seven U.S. patents for educational technologies & toys. He has degrees in experimental psychology and creative writing from Cornell University, an MA in Science Education from Univ. of California Berkeley, and is reported to sing along with a small orange ukulele when no one is looking. His current interests focus around multi-user classroom technologies (including "Classroom Clickers") and immersive simulations for science and history learning.

ABSTRACT

Principles to Practice - Ed Tech Design Challenge
Workshop, Thursday (1:30 - 3:00) in Hall of Ideas E

Utilizing design principles from game and education practices, participants in this workshop will engage in an educational technology design challenge.

Design is a series of trade-offs. Designing educational activities that intrinsically motivate users and support pedagogical goals requires designers to balance features that are at times contradictory. For example, highly engaging features may detract from learning goals. Similarly, a pedagogically-sound design may not be particularly engaging. From our work in designing tech-based educational activities for the museum, where learner's activity is voluntary, our team has explored issues of design from both an educational perspective and a game/play perspective. We routinely draw upon design practices from the videogame industry and the learning sciences community. Our design process includes formative evaluation and iterative design with our users. An on-going goal of our team is to provide other practitioners with principles that are informed by theory and tested in practice.

One of the recent challenges faced by our team was to develop a brief activity to educate kids on the motivations and interests of scientists. Participants of this workshop will propose solutions to this same challenge by learning about general design principles and engaging in a grounded exploration of how these principles apply to the practice of design. We will conclude this session with a presentation of two drastically different designs that our team developed and tested with our audience.