Taking up perspectives of situated cognition and social-cultural theory, we will explore the design of contemporary entertainment video games. We will then see how this inspiration has fueled a series of design based research projects that explore the use of video game and mobile media for learning.

David Gagnon is the Director of Field Day, an education research laboratory at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Composed of a diverse team of educational researchers, software engineers, artists and storytellers, his lab is focused on the intersection of situated and social-cultural learning theories with digital media, specifically video games, mobile technology and mixed reality. Field Day’s games have won numerous awards and are used by hundreds of thousands of learners yearly. Field Day also develops and supports the ARIS platform, an easy to use augmented reality game development tool as well as Siftr, a mobile platform for designing citizen science and citizen ethnography projects.