Game School Design Team

Katie Salen, Institute of Play; Parsons the New School for Design
Katie Salen is the Executive Director of the Institute of Play, and Associate Professor in the Design and Technology, Parsons the New School for Design. Co-author of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, a textbook on game design, as well as The Game Design Reader, she is currently working as lead designer on a digital game designed to teach game design to middle school and high school youth. She recently served as editor for the volume The Ecology of Games for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning, and is co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media. She writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. www.gamersmob.com

Maryann Dickar, NYU
Maryann Dickar is a professor of Secondary Education at New York University, with a doctorate in American Studies from the University of Minnesota (2000). She has published articles on the racial identities of urban teachers, the induction of new teachers into urban schools, and the politics of code-switching for Black inner-city students. She is preparing the final draft of a book on the cultural production of space by students, school officials and teachers in an urban high school to examine the role of student resistance in shaping schooling and school reform. Professor Dickar is also a teacher educator working with pre-service Social Studies teachers and directed NYU’s Alternative Certification Initiative, which prepares teachers for struggling middle schools in New York City. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, she taught Social Studies for 6 years in a Brooklyn high school and became a founding coach of its debate team.

Robert Torres, Design by Design
Robert has worked as a teacher, school principal and education consultant since 1988. His work has focused mostly on school design and currently runs a not for profit which designs small progressive high schools across New York City. Robert wrote and produced a documentary film on the impact of poverty on his Puerto Rican family in New York. The film, Nuyorican Dream, premiered at the Sundance 2000 Film Festival, was acquired by and aired on HBO, and has won numerous awards in the United States and abroad. The documentary offers observations and about the legacy of colonialism, the inadequate American inner-city educational system and discrimination. Robert has a Masters in policy and school administration at Bank Street College of Education and was a Stanford University Research Fellow. Currently Robert is pursuing a doctorate focused on games and learning at New York University. Each Wednesday, Robert hosts bingo night at Chucky Cheese.

Ron Chaluisan, New Visions for Public Schools
Ron Chaluisan has extensive experience leading high school transformation, including 15 years of experience in New York City public schools. Before becoming Vice President of Programs, he was the Director of Small Schools at New Visions and, since 2002, led the comprehensive process of providing a wide range of supports to new and existing small schools throughout the City. From 1994 to 2002, he served as the co-founder and principal of The New York City Museum School, a New Visions small school collaboration between Community School District 2 and the American Museum of Natural History, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Children's Museum of Manhattan, and the South Street Seaport Museum.

Loretta Wolozin, Parsons the New School for Design
Loretta Wolozin, educator, designer, and hockey mom, teaches and coordinates the Research and Writing curriculum for the MFA Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. Long ago, when there were no jobs for teachers, she put her Teacher's Credential and English Literature Master's to work as Education Editor for twenty-five plus years at Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company (Boston). She built the K-12 Teacher Education list, collaborating closely with authors on print and media publications, from acquisitions through production. Her article, Look - Duck Feet: Kinderboard on Kindertable Goes to Classrooms, in TIES: The Online Magazine of Design and Technology Education, www.tiesmagazine.org/archives/dec_2002/ describes her experience as design researcher and participant testing a novel, table top installation prototype in two New Jersey public elementary schools.

Alice Robison, MIT
Alice J. Robison is a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, where she writes and teaches about literacy and new media, especially videogames. At MIT Alice also consults with the MacArthur Foundation's New Media Literacies Project and advises several student-run organizations devoted to the study of videogames and interactive media. Side projects include consulting jobs with publishers, developers, and curriculum designers working on new media initiatives. For more, see http://alicerobison.org

Core Advisors
Robert Hughes, New Visions for Public Schools
Robert L. Hughes was appointed President of New Visions in June 2000. A prominent lawyer, Mr. Hughes formerly served as Deputy Director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a coalition of parent organizations, community school boards, concerned citizens and advocacy groups that seeks to reform New York State's education finance system to ensure adequate resources and the opportunity for a sound basic education for all students in New York City.

Gloria Rakovic, New Visions for Public Schools
Gloria Rakovic joined New Visions in 2002 having served as a principal in urban and suburban environments including three public New York City high schools. Dr. Rakovic has an extensive background in high school redesign, alternative education, and group facilitation. She helped found and served as principal of Park East High School and the High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology.

Joshua Fouts, USC
Joshua Fouts is executive director of the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy, a cross-disciplinary research, teaching and training center run jointly by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and by the USC School of International Relations, a school within the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.

James Paul Gee, Arizona State
James Paul Gee, formerly the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the Mary Lou Fulton Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. His latest book, Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul shows how good video games marry pleasure and learning and have the capacity to empower people.

Mizuko Ito, USC
Mizuko (Mimi) Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, focusing on children and youths changing relationships to media and communications. Her research group at Keio University studies mobile phone use, and she is working with Peter Lyman, Michael Carter, and Diane Harley on a multi-year project on digital kids and informal learning, with support from the MacArthur Foundation.

Michael Levine, Joan Ganz Cooney Center for Children's Media and Research
Michael Levine is currently Founding Executive Director of the newly established Joan Ganz Cooney Center for Children's Media and Research, which will be incubated at Sesame Workshop. This new center will focus on how interactive media can accelerate children's literacy learning (reading, writing, languages, inter-cultural understanding, media literacy) in a global age.

Henry Jenkins, MIT
Henry Jenkins, the DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies, has spent his career studying media and the way people incorporate it into their lives. He is the principle investigator for the MIT-Microsoft Games-to-Teach project, which is examining the educational potential of computer and video games.

Peter Seung-Taek Lee, Gamelab
Peter Lee is the co-founder of Gamelab, a New York City-based game development company. Peter is a digital media renaissance man, equally skilled in visual design, game design, and game programming. He currently holds an Adjunct Professorship at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and Parsons School of Design, and has lectured on the subjects of Game Design and Development.

Jane McGonigal, Institute for the Future
Jane McGonigal is a game designer and games researcher specializing in massively collaborative play. Currently, she is a researcher and resident game designer for the Institute for the Future, a think tank that seeks to solve pressing social problems by generating forecasts of future trends in technology, education, health care, government, and business.

Miodrag Mitrasinovic, Parsons the New School for Design
Architect, author, Associate Professor at Parsons the New School for Design. Designs and academic research published in Metropolis, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Journal of Architecture and Building Science of the Architectural Institute of Japan and elsewhere. Author of Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate 2006), and also co-editor of Travel, Space, Architecture (with J. Traganou) forthcoming from Ashgate in 2007.

Nichole Pinkard, University of Chicago, Center for Urban School Improvement
Dr. Nichole Pinkard is a senior research associate (Assistant Professor) at the University of Chicago's Center for Urban School Improvement (USI), where she serves as director of technology for the center and as USI director of the Information Infrastructure System (IIS) project. Dr. Pinkard plays a leading role in USI's engagement in the ongoing process of researching problems around the integration of advanced technology systems into urban schools.

Amit Pitaru, NYU
Amit Pitaru is a researcher and designer in the field of Assistive Technology and Universal Design. Amit's work examines the manner in which current technologies may augment one's ability to learn and communicate. He has been conducting research with Henry Viscardi School in Long Island, which caters to over two hundred children with disabilities. There he designed hardware and software tools that allow children with various disabilities to better communicate and engage in normal childhood activities of play and social engagement.

John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown is currently a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center at USC. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation until April 2002 and also the director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) until June 2000—a position he held for twelve years. He is the author of many influential publications on learning, including Learning in the Digital Age (2002) and "The Social Life of Learning: How can Continuing Education be Reconfigured in the Future (2002).

Randy Swearer
Randy Swearer has extensive experience in design related fields, strategic planning, and program development. He is currently a consultant specializing in strategic planning and program development. He recently worked with the University of Texas System to envision an inter-campus advanced design research consortium.

Eric Zimmerman, Gamelab
Eric Zimmerman is Co-founder and Director of Game Design at Gamelab. He is the co-author with Katie Salen of Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals and The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2004 & 2006). He is the co-editor with Amy Schulman of RE:PLAY Game Design and Game Culture (Peter Lang, 2003). Eric has published and lectured extensively about game design and game culture, and has exhibited game projects at galleries and museums in the US and abroad.