Building Strong Structures Game Rumble Blocks is an educational game that teaches younger students about building shapes that are less likely to fall over. Players help an alien build a launch platform for his crashed ship. I assisted in designing … Read More

Teaching the Principles of Balance Beanstalk was a game to teach younger students about balance and the scientific process. I worked with entertainment technologists at Carnegie Mellon University to design game levels that lead players through the discovery of the … Read More

Teaching Game Design Thinking The learning technology company ThinkThroughMath was considering how to begin including gamification in their online products and asked me to give them some ideas about how this might work. This is a presentation I gave to … Read More

Using the Open Learning Initiative (OLI) Students were struggling in a college course and the instructor couldn’t figure out why. I used data from computer logs to determine where students ran into trouble and investigated the reasons why these sections … Read More

New Framework for Learning Scientific Method A large team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University was studying educational games for teaching about science to younger students, but they struggled to integrate Social/Emotional Learning into topics as didactic as the scientific … Read More

Moodle Design and Management Online learning management systems are notoriously ugly and unfriendly to users. So when the Institute for Clinical Research Education at the University of Pittsburgh decided to launch an online certificate program, they made the aesthetics and … Read More

Aligning and Standardizing Courses The Institute for Clinical Research Education has a series of courses taught by teams of instructors, often changing year-to-year. To help instructor’s prepare for courses more efficiently, I developed instructor guides containing everything that the current … Read More

Making Instructors Look Good Several times instructors have asked for help updating their lecture slides, often as part of moving the course online. I was able to use both instructional design and graphic design principles to improve the slides’ ability to communicate … Read More

Maintaining Instructor Presence Online Babs Carryer of the University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute was developing a new course on innovation and the development of medical technology. Since this course would be taught in a flipped format, Ms. Carryer recorded lectures … Read More

A Guide to Writing a Grant Application Dr. Doug Landsittel taught a free online course on comparative effectiveness research (CER) available to people underrepresented in the clinical research community. Much of the course was intended to be practical as well … Read More