Organizers
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Yasmin Kafai
Yasmin Kafai, an associate professor at UCLA Graduate School
of Education & Information Studies, just organized in
2004 the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences,
a meeting for over 300 international researchers. She has
conducted extensive research and policy work on gender issues
in IT and produced the report Under the Microscope: A
Decade of Gender Equity Interventions in the Sciences for
the Educational Foundation of the American Association of
University Women (2004) and participated in the report Tech-Savvy:
Educating Girls in the Computer Age (AAUW, 2000) and
many research papers on educational games and learning. She
is author of the book Minds in Play: Computer game Design
as a Context for Children’s Learning and Constructionism
in Practice (1995) co-edited with Mitchel Resnick. She
currently has two NSF-funded studies pertaining to the workshop:
(1) a study of a multi-player online science site for children
and (2) a development of a media-rich design environment for
underprivileged youth.
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Carrie Heeter
Carrie Heeter is a professor of Digital Media Design in the
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and
Media at Michigan State University where she also directs
the Communication Technology Laboratory and is Creative Director
for Virtual University Design and Technology. Heeter
has been creating and studying interactive media experiences
since 1989. In 1995 she won Discover Magazine’s
software innovation of the year award for the Personal
Communicator software. The associated web site
continues to attract more than 9,000,000 visitors per year.
Her recent design projects focus on games for learning.
She currently has two NSF-funded studies pertaining to the
workshop: (1) design of a science learning game with several
variations for use in experimental research on the relationship
between gender, play style, and learning outcomes and (2)
extending conceptualization and understanding of play patterns,
gender, and learning in educational games through interviews
with 25 game designers about their observations throughout
years of playtesting learning game products. Heeter was PI
of the NSF-funded Girls As Designers study comparing process
and products of girl and boy-designed games.
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Jill Denner
Jill Denner is a Senior Research Associate at Education, Training,
Research Associates, a non-profit agency in California. She
currently has NSF funding to develop, implement, and study
an after school and summer program that puts middle school
girls in the role of game designers and programmers. Her initial
publications from that project will appear in the Encyclopedia
of Gender and IT and the journal Frontiers.
She has been invited to present her work at national conferences
and workshops on positive youth development, with a focus
on gender. She is also editing a book of research on the positive
development of Latina girls in the US, to be published by
NYU Press in 2006.
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Jen Sun
Jen Sun is President and one of the founders of Numedeon, Inc,
the company that launched Whyville.net. Whyville is an
educational virtual world targeted at children ages 8 to 14
with 1.3 million registrants and 25,000 unique visitors daily,
two-thirds of which are girls. NSF has funded two research
studies on Whyville. She holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience
from Caltech and has published in Natureand Nature Neuroscience
on visual perception. Prior to Numedeon, she was a founder
of Learning.net and the director of educational development
at Electric SchoolHouse.
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