Play Data Consortium East Coast Workshop at MIT

The Play Data Consortium (in collaboration with The Education Arcade at MIT) is hosting a NSF-funded all-day (9AM - 4PM) workshop at MIT (in Cambridge, MA) on Saturday, February 4th on play, learning, and data for researchers & learning games designers in the US East. As always, our motto is: MAXIMIZE USEFULNESS AND FOSTER COLLABORATION. (I capitalized that text on purpose.) Our goals for the day are: teach faculty & students a couple of new & useful analytic methods; create connections between experts; grow the community; do enjoyable data analysis together; and write NSF proposals that use analytic/multimodal data to enable kids to learn through creative play! The theme of this meeting is play, embodied games, and learning analytics in instrumented spaces. As always, the goal is to keep this workshop short, focused, relevant, and extremely useful to you. Mike Tissenbaum ([email protected]), who is now at MIT, will be the scheduling point person. Of course, you can always email me directly if you have any questions! Short rationale: This NSF-supported workshop brings together researchers and designers who focus on socio-technical play-based learning to develop innovative multimodal analytics, new ways of seeing complex data, and more generally new ways of understanding how people interact through creative play. Our aim is to bring together experts across any of these fields to foster new ideas, insights, and inspirations around a common goal: advancing research, learning, instruction in embodied games learning. A parallel goal is to help scale-up the analytics-based skills of researchers whose work could readily profit from such approaches, but currently don't employ them in their work. Ultimately, the goal of PDC is to support researchers and professionals in thinking about how to leverage data to help kids (rather than leveraging kids to make data). This workshop will focus on the range of multimodal data that can be captured as learners engage in embodied and spatially indexed learning games. As a group, we will dive into this data to brainstorm how this data can be visualized, aggregated, and triangulated towards: 1) understanding how learners collaborate and learn in physically indexed learning spaces; and 2) supporting teachers and learners in real-time. We will also describe how to (and help you) apply for a data consortium fellows small grant to help people get bootstrapped in using creative play data. The meeting is February 4th, 2017, at MIT (Cambridge, MA). If you want to attend (and/or want support for attendance costs, which I recommend), you must get back to Mike ([email protected]) by January 6th; money is first come, first served. We have limited resources, of course, but our goal is to support all interested participants who are close enough to drive in for the day.