Mobile Quest Summer Camp '09

Mobile Quest Team
Katie Salen
Katie Salen is the Executive Director of the Institute of Play, and Associate Professor in the Design and Technology program, Parsons the New School for Design. Co-author of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, as well as The Game Design Reader (MIT Press, 2004 and 2006), she recently completed an edited volume for the MacArthur series on Digital Media and Learning called The Ecology of Games and is serving as co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media (MIT Press). Katie just completed a stint as lead designer on Gamestar Mechanic, a game developed by Gamelab to teach young people the play and practice of game design fundamentals. She lectures and writes extensively on game design, design education, and game culture, including authoring some of the first dispatches from the previously hidden world of machinima. Website http://www.gamersmob.com

David Caroll
An Assistant Professor of Media Design at the School of Art, Media & Technology at Parsons The New School for Design, David Carroll has taught more than 40 studio courses to nearly 500 students since 2001 as a full-time faculty member of the BFA and MFA Design & Technology degree programs. Recently, Carroll founded the Center for Mobile Creativity at Parsons as a research and development facility to support application design for mobile devices and situations in partnership with the Nokia Research Centers at Palo Alto and Beijing. Carroll’s students were finalists of the 2008 Adobe Design Achievement Awards in the Mobile Design category and winners of the 2009 Forum Nokia PRO Mobile Game Design Competition. Prior to pursuing an academic design career, Carroll served as the multimedia director of Second Thought, Inc. and thoughtbubble productions where he led teams serving clients including AOL, AETN, CNN, ESPN, FOX, HBO, PBS, Random House, Smithsonian, SONY, Time, Sports Illustrated, Warner Bros, WETA and others. Carroll earned his MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design in 2000 and his BA in Art History and Religion from Bowdoin College in 1997. His site is http://dave.parsons.edu

Leah Gilliam
Leah Gilliam comes to the Institute of Play after a rich history of teaching, developing academic programs, and designing user experiences using both analog and digital media. Until she left to pursue her love of game design in 2006, Leah was an associate professor of Electronic Arts at Bard College as well as the chair of the Arts Division. A 2008 graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Leah's recent projects include Lesberation, a board game of territory capture and tile placement inspired by the rebellious beginnings of the gay-rights movement; ID, a game of identity theft in which players compete to stockpile and represent complex minority identities; and Metrophile, a big game that transforms the NYC subway system into a playing field.

Mike Edwards
Mike Edwards is a designer and a geek. He has worked with everything from high-traffic e-commerce servers down to surface-mount microcontroller chips. A 2008 graduate of the Parsons Design and Technology MFA program, his thesis had him working with a team in Malawi to create devices that help diagnose malnutrition in children and pregnant women. He has built games on themes as diverse as epidemics, ecology, math, and New York City history. He is currently conducting research into SMALLab, an embodied learning environment. He has even hacked a bathroom sink.

Kyle Li
Kan Yang Li (Kyle) is a life-size dreamer. He came to USA to learn more about interactive design, he has interned in Nike, National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, worked for Skyler Claymation, and U2 2005 world concert. From product design to motion graphic, from still portrait to rock concert, he dreamed it all and he did it all. He has a bachelor degree in Multimedia design and two Master degrees, one in America Art History and the other in Design and Technology. Currently, he is all about making fun games, because he has found the place where dream, passion, and reality can finally come hand-in-hand.

Radhika Tandon
Radhika Tandon holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons, The New School for Design. Her thesis game ‘Panchatantra’, which is a combination of a board game and a website aimed at educating kids on the Panchatantra tales from India, was exhibited at the Games 4 Change Annual Conference Expo in 2006. She has also collaborated with other designers in creating fun games such as ‘Fowl Frenzy’, which won an award for Best Visual Design at Mobile Game Mosh: a 24-hour Game Design Jam. Radhika is interested in designing new gameplay experiences that enhance learning through play. Her past work experience in design and development of interactive online media coupled with her current interest in the areas of games and learning has led her to work on a variety of projects at Scholastic, Global Kids and Institute of Play. She has designed an interactive web tool at Scholastic. She has taught game design to high school students in the Global Kids after school gaming program. At Institute of Play she works on a variety of design and research related projects.

Tracy Gromek
Tracy Gromek draws from her wide-ranging experience as an artist, designer and teacher to create innovative games for the Institute of Play. Tracy holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons, The New School for Design, and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before leaving to pursue her master’s, Tracy worked as an exhibition designer for the Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo creating and designing exhibits such as Madagascar! and Butterfly Garden. She has also animated for Disney, Hasbro and PBS, and developed and taught ESL curriculum for ages 3 to 17 in Spain and China. When she's not at the Institute of Play, Tracy creates interactive games using physical elements and computer vision for television and museums through her company, Electronic Bohemia, and develops new projects for Freedom in Interactive Wearable Art (FiiWA), her line of sporting equipment for individuals with visual and/or physical impairments.

Chloe Varelidi
Chloe Varelidi designs games, spaces and narratives for cities, plants, animals, far away lands, children and grown ups. These designs take the form of multimedia pieces that vary from household robots to installation art to games. Chloe has a background in Architecture and Engineering and also holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons, The New School for Design. Since 2007, she has been part of the Institute of Play team, working with youth and developing innovative tools that embrace game design as an agent of learning and change. In her free time she works in her own studio, in Brooklyn. As a member of various collectives she has designed games for the Solar One Festival, the Philip Johnson Glasshouse Organization, and has exhibited in the 2008 Shenzhen / Hong Kong Biennial of Architecture & Urbanism, the 2nd Annual Exhibition of Art and Science in Beijing, the 5th Pan-Hellenic Architectural Exhibition, the 2005 New Trends in Architecture in Eastern Europe and Asia Pacific and the 2005 International Biennale, in Florence.

Rebecca Rufo-Tepper
Rebecca has been working in the New York City public school system for nine years. Her first teaching job was at A.C.O.R.N. High School for Social Justice, an inner-city school in Bushwick. She is currently a literacy coach at East Side Middle School, a public school in Manhattan, where she previously taught 8th grade Humanities for five years. Rebecca is professional development facilitator for the Holocaust Educators Network in New York City and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. Her work has focused on Lesson Study as a strategy for the development of robust professional development communities. Through lesson study teachers engage in a well-defined process that involves discussing lessons that they have first planned and observed together. She has presented on her research at national conferences, including NCTE, NMSA, and ISCHE. Rebecca is also an instructor of English Education in Hunter College's Curriculum and Teaching Department and is working with Pam Grossman at Stanford University on a research project on New York City ELA teachers, and is completing a PhD at The Graduate Center at CUNY in Urban Education.

Arana Shapiro
Arana has been working in the field of education for ten years. Her first teaching position was in the Inglewood Public School District, where she taught for three years. In Inglewood, Arana served on the district curriculum review team, helping to develop and implement new curriculum in this small district. Upon moving to New York City, Arana began working at Teachers College, Columbia University’s Early Childhood Education Program. At TC, Arana helped develop the Early Childhood Education department’s new student teacher program by visiting New York City public school classrooms and finding appropriate placement and mentorship for TC students. It was during her work at Teachers College when Arana began working with a group of educators to develop curriculum for a new school, The School at Columbia University and subsequently became a founding faculty member of The School in 2003. Arana's desire to bring new media technologies into the classroom prompted her to migrate from the classroom to the technology team at The School and later to the Lead Educational Technologist position at the Ross Institute, where she integrated technology into K-12 classrooms at both The Ross School in East Hampton and Ross Global Academy Charter School. In addition, Arana was a reading specialist for Groundwork for Youth in East New York Public Schools. She has presented research at many national education conferences, including AERA and NCTM. She received her Masters of Arts in Education with an emphasis in Second Language Learning and Acquisition from Pepperdine University, and did coursework in TC’s Communication and Education program.

Peter Lee
Peter Lee is a game designer, entrepreneur, and academic who has been working in the game industry for 12 years. He started his career as a multimedia designer at TIME magazine in 1996. Since than he worked as new media projects for various clients such as Disney, Cartoon Network, Sesemy Workshop, MTV, VH1, and many others. For nine years, Peter was the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Gamelab, a game development company based in New York City that was named one of 5 "Rising Star" design firms by HOW Magazine. Gamelab's games, which include the casual game blockbuster hit Diner Dash, have won awards from the Independent Games Festival, Games for Change, ID Magazine, Art Directors Club, ARS Electronica, as well as finalist nominations in the Webby Awards, the IGDA Developers Choice Awards, and the Zeebys casual game awards. Founded in 2000, Gamelab created innovative games for broad audiences, including singleplayer and multiplayer online games, as well as games in other media both on and off the computer. Gamelab worked with partners including LEGO, HBO, VH-1, Nickelodeon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Disney, Mattel, PlayFirst, PBS, Fisher-Price, Leapfrog, and many, many others. Peter has taught courses at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and Parsons School of Design's MFA in Digital Technologies Program since 2002.

Simeon Poulin
Simeon Poulin is an interactive art director, designer, DJ/musician living in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently an MFA student at Parsons the New School for Design within the Communications Design and Technology department. He is currently focused on interactive story-telling and game design.

Kunal D Patel
Kunal D Patel is a graphic and interactive designer born and raised in New York. As a child, he dreamed of being a comic book illustrator for Marvel. This love of drawing coupled with an interest in construction led him to study Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. After graduation, Kunal was a Junior Architect for 1.5 years working in New York City before deciding to attend graduate school. He wanted to expand his horizons as a designer, which he is currently doing at Parsons in the MFA Design & Technology program. His academic and professional interests include interaction design, game design, and education. In his free time, Kunal is avid professional sports fan, loves to play Rock Band, and enjoys trying great vegetarian restaurants in New York City.

Pollie Barden
Pollie is an avid gamer, who has designed Big games as well as games for the mobile platform. She worked on snagu (http://pabadesigns.com/games/), photo scavenger hunt game that was a 2006 mtvU Digital Incubator Award winner. She co-created Big Tangrams which ran in both the 2009 Come Out and Play Festival and the Figment Festival. Pollie is currently working with the Institute of Play on a wellness social network for the Quest to Learn School that will open this fall. She has a masters from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and was the 2008 Keynote Speaker on Women in Game Design at Bridges Summer Institute at Brooklyn College. She is also an active member of _gaia, a women’s artist collective in Jersey City, who has shown her work in NY, NJ, NC, and Italy. Pollie freely admits she has a Twitter problem and is excited to meet fellow Twitters at mobile camp.