Predoctoral projects

Serious games designed and developed at MSU

Before going to UW–Madison for my doctorate, I earned my master’s degree in Media and Information at Michigan State and was interested in serious game design and development. In my culture, games are often regarded as something addictive and harmful to children. Nonetheless, I believe that games has the potential to attract kids and maintain their attention, and this potential can be leveraged to create great learning experiences.

Here are two example serious games I have worked on.

Tech Trek is a 4-player card game designed to make available to middle school students information about technology related careers. This game is suitable for classrooms, is easy to put together and to play, and is a free engaging activity designed specifically for learning. The goal of this game is to excite middle school students (especially girls) about pursuing technology related careers, so that they carry this excitement throughout their education and hopefully pursue STEM careers in the future. I participated in the design and crafting of this game and a field test at a local middle school.

More information can be found at https://playtechtrek.wordpress.com.

Tech Trek's gameplay

Picky Birds was a game designed for Mandarin Chinese tone learning and practicing. It was a long-term project developed by Michigan State University the Department of Linguistic, Tone Perception Efficacy Study (ToPES) Team. It has been used as the experiment tool for Mandarin tone learning studies twice and been tested by over 100 people. In Picky Birds, player has to click the falling food ring to listen to the sound of Mandarin Chinese and then perceive the tone of that syllable. After perceiving the tone, player needs to delivery the food ring to the bird which matches the tone. In every level, player will get different tokens at every time he/she starts the level. I was the main game programmer for Picky Birds 2.0, working closely with Dr. Catherine Ryu.

Picky Birds has been covered by the university newspaper. Here are the stories: https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2016/learning-mandarin-from-birds https://lilac.msu.edu/news/professor-creates-unique-teaching-and-research-tool/

Picky Birds