Workshop title: Games for Learning

Fun is a pretty good way to engage and educate visitors, form and maintain communities and keep exhibits relevant. So what is the psychology of fun and play, how does it work and how can we use it to breathe life into our museums? Will "fun" and “play” erode the integrity of our content? Is it possible for us to make our play engaging enough to compete with other, less edifying entertainments, and if so, how? How can you create a successful and simple game experience for your museum?

In this half day workshop, we will play. Then we'll take a look at what we played and figure out what made it tick. We'll dissect some successful games to identify what made them succeed. Then we'll launch a game to be played throughout the rest of the conference that will be informative, addictive, engaging and yes, fun. If you attend, you will emerge with some hands-on experience and a deeper understanding of what game design can do to motivate people, spark  learning, build community and culture, and unleash creativity for museums.

Workshop Instructors:

Richard Culatta

@rec54 

Richard Culatta is a leader in the field of educational innovation. He has worked in K-12, higher education, corporate, and government training environments. Culatta regularly speaks on educational technology and learning innovations at international conferences including the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), and the Innovations in eLearning Symposium. He has also published in journals including Computing in the Schools and Learning and Leading with Technology.

His work focuses on leveraging social media to create effective large-scale distributed learning environments. In his role at CIA University, Culatta developed a collaborative online learning platform to extend training opportunities to CIA officers worldwide. Currently he is working with the US Department of Education to develop the Federal Learning Registry.

Before his work with the federal government, Culatta was the learning technologies advisor for the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University and the Director of Operations for the Rose Education Foundation. He began working with instructional technology at the University of Rhode Island where he co-taught the first technology integration workshops for faculty. Since then he has coached instructors and administrators in leveraging social media for learning, provided strategic consulting for organizations, and served on a variety of advisory boards across the US and Latin America.

Culatta is a certified Spanish teacher and active in promoting bilingual and arts education in public schools. He is married to the violinist, Shaundra and lives with his family in Washington DC.

Kellian Adams

kellian@scvngr.com

@museumsninja

Kellian Adams is the "Institutional Mastermind" for SCVNGR, a title which means that either she heads up the museums department at SCVNGR to produce high-quality mobile games for institutions like Smithsonian Enterprises and the Museum of Fine arts, or else she is the most dangerous person in the asylum. We suspect it means both. Kellian works with museums large and small from concept to launch creating custom treks on SCVNGR, a mobile gaming platform that allows people to play mobile games off of any cell phone via text or app. Navigating the world of museum games daily, Kellian is aware of the many platforms available, has seen the many games that museums have created and has become fairly adept at knowing what types of games museum visitors will respond to. She strives to create games that are meaningful, engaging, accessible and most of all, fun.

In her pre-SCVNGR days, Kellian taught middle school English, ESL and History, worked as a QA and testing manager for Rusty and Rosy, a Pearson program adapted to teaching ESL in Shanghai, China and later worked as the Senior Manager of Production for an online game-based language learning product called Activechinese.com. Returning stateside for her Masters degree in teaching, Kellian taught middle school Chinese and began development of Chinastories, a story-based gaming project intended to be a Chinese language after school program. In 2009, she joined forces with SCVNGR as their resident educator and culture nerd and as they say, "The rest is History".  

Kellian is an avid lindy hop (swing) dancer, likes tater tots and peas and wreaks daily havock on her favorite place and hometown, Boston Mass.