by Carol Sadtler
Nichole Pinkard, associate professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM), talks about an interactive songbook she created as a graduate student to help kids learn to read and spell. Its lead character was based on Sam, a 5-year-old girl she tutored at the Cabrini-Green public housing development.
When Sam first saw the little girl pictured on the computer screen, she said, delightedly, “That’s me. That’s my house.” Pinkard says when she saw Sam enter the world on the screen, “it made me realize I’m doing the right thing.”
Katie Salen, who joined CDM as a professor in game design this fall, also began early in her career to create successful strategies for engaging students with digital media. While teaching interactive design at the University of Texas in the mid-1990s, she discovered that games were useful tools to teach students who were learning to build CD-ROMs and websites and how to make them engaging.
“Games are beautiful little systems that you actually can take apart and understand how they work. What you can understand is how to engage and motivate people,” Salen says. “The students got the model right away and were able to transfer what they were learning by looking at games to the design of things that weren’t games.”
These two nationally known interaction design scholars and education innovators create groundbreaking digital media initiatives to prepare a diverse population of students with the skills and education they need to succeed. Both scholars have attracted support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for initiatives that support this goal.
Learning Starts with Engagement
As Salen worked with games, she noticed there was literature about interface design and content but not about engagement–so she wrote some. She co-authored two textbooks about the nature of games and how games work from a design perspective. She became a game designer. She also found herself involved in a project that included young people and other colleagues interested in combining learning and games.
Salen realized that “a game designer is thinking about almost the same things that a teacher is thinking about: Who is my player? Who is my student? What do they know? What do they need to know? How do I support them in reaching the goals that they have in their space? How do I provide structure?”
Pinkard, who was always interested in education but preferred to build software, asked herself similar questions as she went through college and graduate school. The summer after high school graduation, she attended a program in Chicago for high-achieving students during which a prominent educator gave the students a bus ride through an underserved neighborhood on the city’s West Side. “Imagine that you had to walk from this house to school,” he told the students. “Would you be here now if this was your path?”
As an undergraduate computer science student, Pinkard tutored high school students from East Palo Alto, Calif., “where the dropout rate was 50 or 60 percent,” she says. “I’m curious as to why and how I made it out of Kansas City, Kansas, to Stanford University.”
In Northwestern University’s graduate learning sciences program, Pinkard pursued her passion for building computer software and also discussed ideas with experts in education and psychology. “You learn how to respect different people’s perspectives, how to understand and present your ideas in a different way. I always saw things in terms of how I was going to create systems, and educators always thought about how they were going to create curriculums. That’s what I think is here at DePaul–the ability to do that interdisciplinary work,” she says.
Learning Networks across Chicago and Beyond
Pinkard formed and leads several initiatives in Chicago that work together to engage students at school and after school. The Digital Youth Network (DYN) is a digital literacy program that helps students learn to master digital media tools and create and critique new media. DYN provides young people with adult mentors–both older students and artists–who work at in-school and after-school sites.
YOUmedia features youth-centered learning spaces equipped with digital tools at Chicago Public Library (CPL) sites. The program engages high school youth in activities that promote critical thinking, creativity, skill-building and collaborative opportunities. Remix World is a private social learning network where DYN participants and select adult mentors can share their digital productions.
Salen leads the non-profit organization that collaborates with ChicagoQuest, a charter school supported in part by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation that opened its doors this fall to sixth- and seventh-graders at North Ogden Avenue in Chicago. ChicagoQuest is an innovative public school that uses the power of games to engage students and support them in learning critical thinking, innovation and problem-solving skills that will help them succeed in college and their careers. It has its roots in Quest to Learn, a school founded by Salen and some colleagues in New York, where Salen also served as professor of technology and design at Parsons The New School for Design.
The Mission Fits
Pinkard sees the connections between what she does and DePaul’s mission of providing access to higher education. “It’s possible to have a real cycle of helping kids understand what’s possible, providing them pathways to go all the way through. Particularly in the digital space–we can do something from middle school to high school to DePaul.”
Salen also sees a fit within CDM’s game development program. “It’s interesting to be in a place with a design program that also cares about teaching and learning. That’s an unusual combination. The goal is that we can start to work with undergraduate and graduate students who might go on to work in schools, in new media, might go on to be mentors or design games that can be used in a lot of different contexts,” she says.
Innovating, Improving, Growing
Salen is part of the Connected Learning Research Network, also funded by the MacArthur Foundation. The seven or eight people involved in the network will be “trying to figure out how to codify this model that the Quest schools and Nichole’s DYN uses,” she says. “What are the design principles? What are the types of resources and infrastructures that need to be put into place?”
Pinkard is working collaboratively with CPL to open YOUmedia locally and nationally. She wants to foster synergies between her college and the College of Education and College of Communication to create “new windows in” for digital media learners.
And she’s promised herself to do that interactive songbook she created years ago for the iPad, so 5-year-olds, including her twin nieces, can get going on it. “The iPad is the tool that this was designed for,” Pinkard says.