Episode 123 Travis Windleharth on foundry10
Travis Windleharth on foundry10
Episode Summary:
In this episode of Experience Points, Dave Eng chats with Travis Windleharth from foundry10 about games-based learning. Travis, with a background in science education, museology, and information science, focuses on how games shape youth's understanding of STEM concepts. Foundry10, co-founded by Gabe Newell, is explored, emphasizing its pillars—programs, philanthropy, and research—and their role in expanding learning perspectives. Travis discusses his role in the STEM design-based research lab, aligning with interest area teams. The episode concludes with insights into Foundry10's collaborative approach to research and program design.
Travis Windleharth
he/him/his
Foundry10
Travis is a learning researcher with a background in evaluating and researching outcomes of experiences delivered in a broad range of content delivery formats, from games, to comics, to community science programs. He holds an M.Ed. in Science Education, an M.A. in Museology, and a Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. Travis works most extensively in game-based learning, and studies how youth mental models of STEM concepts form and change when they interact with these systems designed into a game environment.
Social Media: (Website): https://www.foundry10.org/
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng, from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode we'll learn from Travis Windleharth. Travis is a learning researcher specializing in evaluating outcomes of diverse content delivery formats, including games, comics, and community science programs. With a master’s in education and science education, a master of arts in museology and a PhD in information science in the University of Washington, he focuses on games-based learning. Travis explores how youth mental models of STEM concepts evolve through interactions with game environments. Travis, welcome to the show.
Travis Windleharth:
Thank you, Dave.
Dave Eng:
So Travis, your background is very interesting and I also want to tell people, full disclosure, I was Travis's third reader for his dissertation, so I'm very familiar with your work overall, Travis, but I realize that not a lot of other people are, so could you take a moment to talk about your background in games-based learning? Specifically, could you share some insights into your journey and how your background in science education, museology and information science led you to become a learning researcher, particularly focusing on games-based learning?
Travis Windleharth:
Absolutely, and thank you, Dave. It was a privilege to have you on my dissertation committee, and it went a long way toward all of these things that we'll talk about today, especially some of the techniques I picked up inspired by you.
Dave Eng:
Great.
Travis Windleharth:
So yeah, my background is interesting. I did have this arc where I started out with this master's in science education that I actually got while I was working in the private sector. I was instructed to start building technical materials for non-technical audiences about the products that I was developing, or that we were developing in this company at the time, and I got this master's degree in science education. During that journey, I actually really liked that more than the work I was doing at the time and thought, "I would really like to do this for a career."
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
So, I've wrapped up my private sector career and entered this museology program at the University of Washington, which was fantastic. That's really where I got to thinking about design and I link design across all of these elements. STEM interventions, museology interventions like exhibits, community science programs and games is the common theme. So it got me very much thinking about design-based research, particularly when it comes to STEM.
When it comes to games specifically, it's just simply been a part of my life since I was a young child. I grew up in a very rural area in farm country in Southern California, and that was something that I did when it was 120 degrees outside.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Travis Windleharth:
So you've heard, and you talk often about the benefits of game-based learning. I simply sewed all of these elements together and was able to get a position as a PhD student at the Information School at the University of Washington, and thinking really about the information environment of games, how you can model something in the real world, a STEM concept in a game, and then others can explore it and learn from that.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Travis. I appreciate that. I think that prior to this interview starting, I had to get your background and insight on museology. Could you talk a little bit more about that program overall? Because I think that the individuals that go to museums are going to be different from the individuals that attend a traditional learning environment, because I think that people that go to museums have an intrinsic motivation to want to learn there. Could you talk a little bit more about museology? Because I think that's an interesting component of your background.
Travis Windleharth:
Oh, absolutely. You said something interesting right there. You talked about the reasons that people go to museums, and there's actually been some work done on this and it underpins a lot of how some people think about museums. John Falk, who was a Sea Grant recipient learning researcher at University of Oregon talks about the five visitor identities in museums, right?
You have the hobbyists who are sort of interested in the content a little bit more than some folks, you have the facilitators, you have the spiritual renewers or the ... and really what we know about museums is as much as anything, they're a social object. For the average museum visitor to the average museum, that just happens to be the thing that they're doing that day and they're usually doing it with other people, which maybe is a little bit humbling for the field to think about, but it does describe the context for which you need to design for most people.
You've got a couple of people, maybe their kids, maybe their parents, maybe their friends for an hour or two or three, and they may or may not be interested in the topic of the museum. That might not be their favorite topic in the world, so how do you design something accessible for those people that they can digest very quickly? We're already getting into thinking about design and design for who and aspects of that context.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
So a lot of the program at the University of Washington, leaders in the field say, who are you designing for? It's not what this is about fundamentally as who is it's for. Of course there's going to be domain-related content, but we think a lot about users as you do with any kind of design, so that is an important aspect across the game elements as well.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
But yes, the University of Washington Museology Program has been around for many decades. It's an excellent program and situated in a city with a lot of very good museums, so you get experience at working with this type of design and thinking about these kinds of visitors, and how you can design for specific people and how the design interacts with the contexts in which you're putting it.
Dave Eng:
Right. Thank you, Travis. Appreciate it. I think that's a really good segue into our second question here, because you were talking a lot about design, who you're designing for, why you're designing for them. I want to know more about foundry10 and your work specifically. So, foundry10 seems to approach learning through research, programs and philanthropy. Can you elaborate on how these three aspects interconnect with your work and how they contribute to your mission of expanding the way people think about learning overall?
Travis Windleharth:
Absolutely, thank you. foundry10 is an excellent and unique organization. It was founded just over 10 years ago by our CEO, Lisa Castaneda and Gabe Newell, and we really wanted to ... well, they back then wanted to do these very things that you introduced about the organization, expand the way we think about learning and create value for youth.
It's grown quite a lot in the last 10 years. We're at 50-ish employees and we do organize our work and think about it in what we call pillars. So you mentioned programs, philanthropy and research, and also sharing, how we take this information and make sure that anything that might be useful to an end user or an audience gets to that audience, so we have a sharing team as our fourth pillar that helps us with all of the pillars.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
In terms of my work, it's really interesting, because each of these pillars can operate independently of ... each aspect is not necessarily integrated. So we might have a partner for which we are contributing philanthropic funds, but we might not be doing research or programs, or we might have a partner that we develop a program with and we do want to do some research. So sometimes each of these aspects are independent, but sometimes they are integrated.
For example, an organization called Game to Grow, maybe you've seen something about that based here locally in Seattle, they do a lot of work with social-emotional learning and tabletop role-playing games.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Travis Windleharth:
So that's an example of an organization where we had contributed some philanthropic funds because we believe in their work, and we were adjacent to the program development, but we also apply our program thinking as well to there. We ended up conducting some research in partnership with them and developed a paper, some of my colleagues did about the positive outcomes of tabletop role-playing games and this social-emotional learning benefit.
So, they can interplay quite a bit and in a lot of cases it opens doors. I want to speak about this a little bit sensitively. We're not buying access, but we are sometimes able to get a force multiplier, I guess is the best way to put it, out of some of the philanthropy when it comes to being able to deploy, for instance, more programs to collect more data, so that we can use that data to complete our research and learn something about the program or a specific type of design or intervention.
Dave Eng:
I see. All right, thank you, Travis. Appreciate it. I think that leveraging the philanthropic arm of foundry10 is incredibly useful, particularly as there are other organizations out there that have the same or similar mission, so I can identify with that. This I actually have to confess, I didn't know before. So, you said one of the co-founders is Gabe Newell. Is this the same Gabe Newell of Steam?
Travis Windleharth:
Yes, it is one and the same, Gabe Newell.
Dave Eng:
I see. So, have you met Gabe? What is it like working for the organization that he's a co-founder of? Tell me more about that.
Travis Windleharth:
Sure. Of course Gabe is very busy with Valve. I have met Gabe. He's a very intelligent and thoughtful person, and really a lot of his heart is what fueled this organization from the beginning, and Lisa's passion. Yeah, and Lisa largely runs the show, because she's been here since the beginning and really carries the vision of the organization. So, it's Lisa that we all rally behind and work with to implement the annual strategy or move in the directions that are identified as the strategic direction from the organization.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Travis Windleharth:
But those are the ingredients, so to speak, that came together to create this organization, foundry10, really importantly tying it back to this core mission of applying these resources to create value for youth and expand the way that we think about learning, and we focus on that first and foremost.
Dave Eng:
I see. All right, thank you, Travis. I appreciate it. I want to jump into our third and last question here, because you brought it up before. I wanted to talk more about research and applications, again, specifically with your work at foundry10. Your research covers a wide range of topics from socio-emotional learning, like you brought up before, to the value of technology in learning. So my question is, how do you decide on the focus areas of your research and how does the research inform the design of the programs at foundry10?
Travis Windleharth:
Yeah, that's a great question. There's sort of a history to this. Early on, we want to be very responsive, so we pay attention to what's happening of course in the academic literature and scholarship, identify where the gaps are based on our areas of expertise, but we also have hundreds of community partners that we've worked with over the years. Most of them, but not all of them in Washington State. Some of them, but not all of them tied to specific learning environments, nonprofits, afterschool programs, those sorts of things.
It's really a combination of identifying a need or a gap that could use maybe a new approach, and then if there is overlap with expertise of one or more researchers on the team, it becomes an idea for a research project, and then we can move it forward from there.
I should note that we have four labs right now at foundry10, so we have the research pillar and we work in the research pillar with interest area teams. So we have four scoped, but flexible interest area teams that are sort of like, I guess, domain. So we have a health and wellbeing, we have technology, media and information literacy, we have creativity, design and play, and we have a career connected learning and life skills. So if there's a gap in there that we've identified through these partnerships or through this literature review or just kind of monitoring the field, that could be the genesis of some research ideas.
Independent of the interest area teams, we actually have four labs that I mentioned. I am the principal investigator of the STEM design-based research lab, so I keep coming back to this concept of design and how you design, whether it's a museological exhibit or a community science program or a game with all of its systems and structures, what are the design elements that are most effective and how do they work, and how do they change how youth think about real world domain systems?
So, each of these four labs also has a set of knowledge gaps that we've tabulated and written down and articulated that we aim to address through our work. So, it's really a triangulation between either an interest area team gap or a lab gap and some sort of identified need in the community. We ideate, we identify a project, and then we try to think of an interesting way to address it with a research project.
Dave Eng:
Excellent. Thank you, Travis. Really interesting information about your interest area teams. Would you say that any one of them is busier than the others? Do you tend to get more projects in one as compared to the others, I guess based on what you've observed so far?
Travis Windleharth:
Well, that's a good question. We've had an interest area team structure essentially from the beginning and what it has looked like has evolved. In prior years it has been very specific, so we've had dance and games and learning was a specific interest area team, digital audio, art, STEM, those sorts of things. We put them in these four teams or in these four broader interest area teams to make it more sustainable, but also to sort of leverage, I guess, different interests together within the same umbrella.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Travis Windleharth:
The teams themselves, in terms of how busy they are, they really all operate a little bit differently. There's a team lead for each team, so every researcher sits on one of these teams in addition to being part of a lab. So while I am the principal investigator of the STEM design-based research lab, I also sit on the creativity design and play team thinking very much about play in learning in my role there.
Our team lead, Rachel Gaudry, oversees a project portfolio and a philanthropy portfolio and the overall strategy of that interest area team. So there's a lot of conversations that go on about what type of research to do, what types of programs to develop based on all of the things we've talked about before. So it looks very different for every team, because the constitution of each team is very different, and what they work on is very different and they have different team leads.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Travis. I appreciate it. So again, thank you for your time today. I appreciate learning more about you, your work, and everything you do at foundry10. So if people wanted to learn more about you and foundry10, where can they go?
Travis Windleharth:
They should certainly go to foundry10.org, and one of the best ways to keep up on all of our initiatives is to sign up for our newsletter, which you can do directly from our webpage. The newsletter is the best way to keep tabs on what we're up to, and you can see my bio and contact information, as well as my lab information on the webpage at foundry10.org also.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Travis. I'll make sure that we will include links to those in the references or show notes. Thanks again for being on the show.
Travis Windleharth:
Thank you so much, Dave.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP.
On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit.
Also, make sure to visit University XP online at universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter @University_XP, and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on.
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2024, October 27). Travis Windleharth on foundry10. (No. 123) Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/123
Internal Ref: UXPH32S70LMO
References
Eng, D. (2020, March 26). What is Games-Based Learning? Retrieved March 14, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/3/26/what-is-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2020, September 10). What is Intrinsic Motivation? Retrieved March 14, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/9/10/what-is-intrinsic-motivation
Falk, J. H. (2006). An identity‐centered approach to understanding museum learning. Curator: The museum journal, 49(2), 151-166. https://pacificsciencecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/falk-2006-visitor-motivations.pdf
Sáinz, M., Fàbregues, S., Romano, M. J., & López, B. S. (2022). Interventions to increase young people's interest in STEM. A scoping review. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 954996. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.954996/full
Windleharth, T. W. (2021). Mental models, meaning, & games: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of player meaning making in a complex STEM themed video game (Order No. 28962871). Available from ProQuest Central; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2651807687). Retrieved from https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/48520?show=full
Tags
games-based learning, stem research, museology, design-based research, foundry10, travis windleharth, foundry10
Categories
games-based learning
travis windleharth
foundry10
Dave Eng:
Hi, and welcome to Experience Points by University XP. On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. I'm your host Dave Eng, from Games-Based Learning by University XP. Find out more by going to www.universityxp.com.
On today's episode we'll learn from Travis Windleharth. Travis is a learning researcher specializing in evaluating outcomes of diverse content delivery formats, including games, comics, and community science programs. With a master’s in education and science education, a master of arts in museology and a PhD in information science in the University of Washington, he focuses on games-based learning. Travis explores how youth mental models of STEM concepts evolve through interactions with game environments. Travis, welcome to the show.
Travis Windleharth:
Thank you, Dave.
Dave Eng:
So Travis, your background is very interesting and I also want to tell people, full disclosure, I was Travis's third reader for his dissertation, so I'm very familiar with your work overall, Travis, but I realize that not a lot of other people are, so could you take a moment to talk about your background in games-based learning? Specifically, could you share some insights into your journey and how your background in science education, museology and information science led you to become a learning researcher, particularly focusing on games-based learning?
Travis Windleharth:
Absolutely, and thank you, Dave. It was a privilege to have you on my dissertation committee, and it went a long way toward all of these things that we'll talk about today, especially some of the techniques I picked up inspired by you.
Dave Eng:
Great.
Travis Windleharth:
So yeah, my background is interesting. I did have this arc where I started out with this master's in science education that I actually got while I was working in the private sector. I was instructed to start building technical materials for non-technical audiences about the products that I was developing, or that we were developing in this company at the time, and I got this master's degree in science education. During that journey, I actually really liked that more than the work I was doing at the time and thought, "I would really like to do this for a career."
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
So, I've wrapped up my private sector career and entered this museology program at the University of Washington, which was fantastic. That's really where I got to thinking about design and I link design across all of these elements. STEM interventions, museology interventions like exhibits, community science programs and games is the common theme. So it got me very much thinking about design-based research, particularly when it comes to STEM.
When it comes to games specifically, it's just simply been a part of my life since I was a young child. I grew up in a very rural area in farm country in Southern California, and that was something that I did when it was 120 degrees outside.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Travis Windleharth:
So you've heard, and you talk often about the benefits of game-based learning. I simply sewed all of these elements together and was able to get a position as a PhD student at the Information School at the University of Washington, and thinking really about the information environment of games, how you can model something in the real world, a STEM concept in a game, and then others can explore it and learn from that.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Travis. I appreciate that. I think that prior to this interview starting, I had to get your background and insight on museology. Could you talk a little bit more about that program overall? Because I think that the individuals that go to museums are going to be different from the individuals that attend a traditional learning environment, because I think that people that go to museums have an intrinsic motivation to want to learn there. Could you talk a little bit more about museology? Because I think that's an interesting component of your background.
Travis Windleharth:
Oh, absolutely. You said something interesting right there. You talked about the reasons that people go to museums, and there's actually been some work done on this and it underpins a lot of how some people think about museums. John Falk, who was a Sea Grant recipient learning researcher at University of Oregon talks about the five visitor identities in museums, right?
You have the hobbyists who are sort of interested in the content a little bit more than some folks, you have the facilitators, you have the spiritual renewers or the ... and really what we know about museums is as much as anything, they're a social object. For the average museum visitor to the average museum, that just happens to be the thing that they're doing that day and they're usually doing it with other people, which maybe is a little bit humbling for the field to think about, but it does describe the context for which you need to design for most people.
You've got a couple of people, maybe their kids, maybe their parents, maybe their friends for an hour or two or three, and they may or may not be interested in the topic of the museum. That might not be their favorite topic in the world, so how do you design something accessible for those people that they can digest very quickly? We're already getting into thinking about design and design for who and aspects of that context.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
So a lot of the program at the University of Washington, leaders in the field say, who are you designing for? It's not what this is about fundamentally as who is it's for. Of course there's going to be domain-related content, but we think a lot about users as you do with any kind of design, so that is an important aspect across the game elements as well.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
But yes, the University of Washington Museology Program has been around for many decades. It's an excellent program and situated in a city with a lot of very good museums, so you get experience at working with this type of design and thinking about these kinds of visitors, and how you can design for specific people and how the design interacts with the contexts in which you're putting it.
Dave Eng:
Right. Thank you, Travis. Appreciate it. I think that's a really good segue into our second question here, because you were talking a lot about design, who you're designing for, why you're designing for them. I want to know more about foundry10 and your work specifically. So, foundry10 seems to approach learning through research, programs and philanthropy. Can you elaborate on how these three aspects interconnect with your work and how they contribute to your mission of expanding the way people think about learning overall?
Travis Windleharth:
Absolutely, thank you. foundry10 is an excellent and unique organization. It was founded just over 10 years ago by our CEO, Lisa Castaneda and Gabe Newell, and we really wanted to ... well, they back then wanted to do these very things that you introduced about the organization, expand the way we think about learning and create value for youth.
It's grown quite a lot in the last 10 years. We're at 50-ish employees and we do organize our work and think about it in what we call pillars. So you mentioned programs, philanthropy and research, and also sharing, how we take this information and make sure that anything that might be useful to an end user or an audience gets to that audience, so we have a sharing team as our fourth pillar that helps us with all of the pillars.
Dave Eng:
Right.
Travis Windleharth:
In terms of my work, it's really interesting, because each of these pillars can operate independently of ... each aspect is not necessarily integrated. So we might have a partner for which we are contributing philanthropic funds, but we might not be doing research or programs, or we might have a partner that we develop a program with and we do want to do some research. So sometimes each of these aspects are independent, but sometimes they are integrated.
For example, an organization called Game to Grow, maybe you've seen something about that based here locally in Seattle, they do a lot of work with social-emotional learning and tabletop role-playing games.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Travis Windleharth:
So that's an example of an organization where we had contributed some philanthropic funds because we believe in their work, and we were adjacent to the program development, but we also apply our program thinking as well to there. We ended up conducting some research in partnership with them and developed a paper, some of my colleagues did about the positive outcomes of tabletop role-playing games and this social-emotional learning benefit.
So, they can interplay quite a bit and in a lot of cases it opens doors. I want to speak about this a little bit sensitively. We're not buying access, but we are sometimes able to get a force multiplier, I guess is the best way to put it, out of some of the philanthropy when it comes to being able to deploy, for instance, more programs to collect more data, so that we can use that data to complete our research and learn something about the program or a specific type of design or intervention.
Dave Eng:
I see. All right, thank you, Travis. Appreciate it. I think that leveraging the philanthropic arm of foundry10 is incredibly useful, particularly as there are other organizations out there that have the same or similar mission, so I can identify with that. This I actually have to confess, I didn't know before. So, you said one of the co-founders is Gabe Newell. Is this the same Gabe Newell of Steam?
Travis Windleharth:
Yes, it is one and the same, Gabe Newell.
Dave Eng:
I see. So, have you met Gabe? What is it like working for the organization that he's a co-founder of? Tell me more about that.
Travis Windleharth:
Sure. Of course Gabe is very busy with Valve. I have met Gabe. He's a very intelligent and thoughtful person, and really a lot of his heart is what fueled this organization from the beginning, and Lisa's passion. Yeah, and Lisa largely runs the show, because she's been here since the beginning and really carries the vision of the organization. So, it's Lisa that we all rally behind and work with to implement the annual strategy or move in the directions that are identified as the strategic direction from the organization.
Dave Eng:
I see.
Travis Windleharth:
But those are the ingredients, so to speak, that came together to create this organization, foundry10, really importantly tying it back to this core mission of applying these resources to create value for youth and expand the way that we think about learning, and we focus on that first and foremost.
Dave Eng:
I see. All right, thank you, Travis. I appreciate it. I want to jump into our third and last question here, because you brought it up before. I wanted to talk more about research and applications, again, specifically with your work at foundry10. Your research covers a wide range of topics from socio-emotional learning, like you brought up before, to the value of technology in learning. So my question is, how do you decide on the focus areas of your research and how does the research inform the design of the programs at foundry10?
Travis Windleharth:
Yeah, that's a great question. There's sort of a history to this. Early on, we want to be very responsive, so we pay attention to what's happening of course in the academic literature and scholarship, identify where the gaps are based on our areas of expertise, but we also have hundreds of community partners that we've worked with over the years. Most of them, but not all of them in Washington State. Some of them, but not all of them tied to specific learning environments, nonprofits, afterschool programs, those sorts of things.
It's really a combination of identifying a need or a gap that could use maybe a new approach, and then if there is overlap with expertise of one or more researchers on the team, it becomes an idea for a research project, and then we can move it forward from there.
I should note that we have four labs right now at foundry10, so we have the research pillar and we work in the research pillar with interest area teams. So we have four scoped, but flexible interest area teams that are sort of like, I guess, domain. So we have a health and wellbeing, we have technology, media and information literacy, we have creativity, design and play, and we have a career connected learning and life skills. So if there's a gap in there that we've identified through these partnerships or through this literature review or just kind of monitoring the field, that could be the genesis of some research ideas.
Independent of the interest area teams, we actually have four labs that I mentioned. I am the principal investigator of the STEM design-based research lab, so I keep coming back to this concept of design and how you design, whether it's a museological exhibit or a community science program or a game with all of its systems and structures, what are the design elements that are most effective and how do they work, and how do they change how youth think about real world domain systems?
So, each of these four labs also has a set of knowledge gaps that we've tabulated and written down and articulated that we aim to address through our work. So, it's really a triangulation between either an interest area team gap or a lab gap and some sort of identified need in the community. We ideate, we identify a project, and then we try to think of an interesting way to address it with a research project.
Dave Eng:
Excellent. Thank you, Travis. Really interesting information about your interest area teams. Would you say that any one of them is busier than the others? Do you tend to get more projects in one as compared to the others, I guess based on what you've observed so far?
Travis Windleharth:
Well, that's a good question. We've had an interest area team structure essentially from the beginning and what it has looked like has evolved. In prior years it has been very specific, so we've had dance and games and learning was a specific interest area team, digital audio, art, STEM, those sorts of things. We put them in these four teams or in these four broader interest area teams to make it more sustainable, but also to sort of leverage, I guess, different interests together within the same umbrella.
Dave Eng:
Yeah.
Travis Windleharth:
The teams themselves, in terms of how busy they are, they really all operate a little bit differently. There's a team lead for each team, so every researcher sits on one of these teams in addition to being part of a lab. So while I am the principal investigator of the STEM design-based research lab, I also sit on the creativity design and play team thinking very much about play in learning in my role there.
Our team lead, Rachel Gaudry, oversees a project portfolio and a philanthropy portfolio and the overall strategy of that interest area team. So there's a lot of conversations that go on about what type of research to do, what types of programs to develop based on all of the things we've talked about before. So it looks very different for every team, because the constitution of each team is very different, and what they work on is very different and they have different team leads.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Travis. I appreciate it. So again, thank you for your time today. I appreciate learning more about you, your work, and everything you do at foundry10. So if people wanted to learn more about you and foundry10, where can they go?
Travis Windleharth:
They should certainly go to foundry10.org, and one of the best ways to keep up on all of our initiatives is to sign up for our newsletter, which you can do directly from our webpage. The newsletter is the best way to keep tabs on what we're up to, and you can see my bio and contact information, as well as my lab information on the webpage at foundry10.org also.
Dave Eng:
Great. Thank you, Travis. I'll make sure that we will include links to those in the references or show notes. Thanks again for being on the show.
Travis Windleharth:
Thank you so much, Dave.
Dave Eng:
I hope you found this episode useful. If you'd like to learn more, then a great place to start is my free course on gamification. You can sign up for it at www.universityxp.com/gamification. You can also get a full transcript of this episode, including links to references in the description or show notes. Thanks for joining us. Again, I'm your host, Dave Eng from games-based learning by University XP.
On Experience Points we explore different ways we can learn from games. If you like this episode, please consider commenting, sharing and subscribing. Subscribing is absolutely free and ensures that you'll get the next episode of Experience Points delivered directly to you. I'd also love it if you took some time to rate the show. We live to lift others with learning, so if you found this episode useful, consider sharing it with someone who could also benefit.
Also, make sure to visit University XP online at universityxp.com. University XP is also on Twitter @University_XP, and on Facebook and LinkedIn as University XP. Also, feel free to email me anytime. My email address is dave@universityxp.com. Game on.
Cite this Episode
Eng, D. (Host). (2024, October 27). Travis Windleharth on Foundry10. (No. 123) Video]. Experience Points. University XP. https://www.universityxp.com/video/123
Internal Ref: UXPH32S70LMO
References
Eng, D. (2020, March 26). What is Games-Based Learning? Retrieved March 14, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/3/26/what-is-games-based-learning
Eng, D. (2020, September 10). What is Intrinsic Motivation? Retrieved March 14, 2024, from https://www.universityxp.com/blog/2020/9/10/what-is-intrinsic-motivation
Falk, J. H. (2006). An identity‐centered approach to understanding museum learning. Curator: The museum journal, 49(2), 151-166. https://pacificsciencecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/falk-2006-visitor-motivations.pdf
Sáinz, M., Fàbregues, S., Romano, M. J., & López, B. S. (2022). Interventions to increase young people's interest in STEM. A scoping review. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 954996. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.954996/full
Windleharth, T. W. (2021). Mental models, meaning, & games: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of player meaning making in a complex STEM themed video game (Order No. 28962871). Available from ProQuest Central; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (2651807687). Retrieved from https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/48520?show=full