Motivational Environment's research advances Human-Computer Interac-tion that incorporates wearable and ambient sensors, responsive spaces, robots and relational agents. Real-time multi-modal characters are begin-ning to sense and respond to learners' affective cues, they are beginning to become Affective Learning Companions. These in turn form a foundation for extending avant-garde "real-life games" and blurring motivations in everyday digital-physical-social environments; Game As Life - Life As Game is transforming learning experiences. An example of this is the NASA sponsored Astronaut Robot Mission Simulator facilitating exploration by project based teams and novel tangible Human-Robot Interactions. Recently, an innovative HCI paradigm, Slow Computing, has been advanced to encourage computational thinking, constructionist learning, play and exploration, in collaboration with the Universe. This suite of technologies and activities is forming a transdisciplinary framework and context to study and foster motivation, learning, teamwork, and creativity.

Winslow Burleson is an Assistant Professor in the Arts Media and Engineering (AME) Program with a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Arizona State University. His research centers on human computer interaction and its applications in the domains of affective computing, creative computing, design engineering, and the digital media arts. He earned his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab where he worked with the Affective Computing Group and the Context-Aware Computing Group. He has worked with the USER Group at IBM's Almaden Research Center and holds a Master of Science degree from Stanford University's Mechanical Engineering Product Design Program. At Stanford he served as a lecturer on brainstorming, creativity, and visual thinking. Prior work included curriculum development at the SETI Institute, co-principal investigator on the Hubble Space Telescope's Investigation of Binary Asteroids, and consultant to UNICEF and the World Scout Bureau on Healthy Lifestyles for Youth. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics from Rice University.

Tisch School of the Arts, 9h floor, Rm. 940 • 721 Broadway • NYC

James Paul Gee is a member of the National Academy of Education. His book Sociolinguistics and Literacies (1990, Third Edition 2007) was one of the founding documents in the formation of the "New Literacy Studies", an interdisciplinary field devoted to studying language, learning, and literacy in an integrated way in the full range of their cognitive, social, and cultural contexts. His book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1999, Second Edition 2005) brings together his work on a methodology for studying communication in its cultural settings, an approach that has been widely influential over the last two decades.

Professor Gee's most recent books deal with video games, language, and learning. What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2003, Second Edition 2007) argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. Situated Language and Learning (2004) places video games within an overall theory of learning and literacy and shows how they can help us in thinking about the reform of schools. His most recent book is Good Video Games and Good Learning: Collected Essays (2007). Professor Gee has published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences, and education.

This talk will deal with how video games can organize deep conceptual understanding, as well as a variety of 21st Century skills not often on offer in our schools today. Unfortunately, as our schools have stressed skill and drill, some people are using games for this purpose, rather than using them to radically transform our broken and outdated educational system. Finally, He will discuss the different learning theories that underlie different approaches to games for learning.

Warren Weaver Hall Room 109 • 4th Street and Mercer • NYC

Although the adult brain is far from being fixed, the types of experience that promote learning and brain plasticity in adulthood are still poorly understood. Surprisingly, the very act of playing action video games appears to lead to widespread enhancements in visual skills in young adults. Action video game players have been shown to outperform their non-action-game playing peers on a variety of sensory and attentional tasks. They search for a target in a cluttered environment more efficiently, are able to track more objects at once and process rapidly fleeting images more accurately. This performance difference has also been noted in choice reaction time tasks, with video game players manifesting a large decrease in reaction time as compared to their non-action-game playing peers. A common mechanism may be at the source of this wide range of skill improvement. In particular, improvement in performance following action video game play can be captured by more efficient integration of information, or in other words, a more faithful Bayesian inference step, suggesting that action gamers may have learned to learn.

Pless Hall • 5th Floor Conference Room • 82 Washington Square East • NYC

Join us the day before the 6th Annual Games for Change Festival (www.gamesforchange.org ) for a day of discussion and networking with educational game designers, developers, evaluators and users, as we consider the current landscape of games for learning and forge new collaborations to empirically develop design patterns for effective educational games. Present a poster about your current work and find out how you can join the Institute. Please email info@g4li.org for poster requirements and template and to RSVP for the summit.

King Juan Carlos Center • 53 Washington Square South • NYC .