Higher-Ed Edtech Conferences You Need to Know for 2017

Ray Batra at Edtech has compiled a great list of conferences to attend in 2017.

“As we close the books on 2016, we can’t help but look forward to the New Year. Just in time for you to plan your 2017 professional travels, we’ve updated our picks of notable edtech & innovation conferences for higher-ed educators, administrators and companies.

Our free conference map includes dates, locations, brief descriptions of why and for whom each conference might be valuable as well as clickable names that link to each conference website.”

See the full list and article: Higher-Ed Edtech Conferences You Need to Know for 2017

The Gamer’s Brain: A Broad Review of Cognitive Mechanisms

Celia Hodent from Epic Games provides a broad view of the cognitive mechanisms involved in games in her talk from GDC 2016 entitled “The Gamer’s Brain, Part 2: UX of Onboarding and Player Engagement.”

Please see the following description from the GDC Vault: “Engaging your audience within the first minutes of play is a delicate endeavor, and has become a critical aspect of development in the era of free-to-play games. If the developers fail to captivate their audience’s attention quickly, there won’t even be any retention challenges to care about. This talk will cover the common onboarding pitfalls, provide guidelines from User Experience (UX), and discuss best-practices by using knowledge of how the brain learns. It will provide examples from various titles (including insights from the development of Epic Games’ Fortnite) to help you improve player engagement during early exposure with your game.”

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023231/The-Gamer-s-Brain-Part

Learning by design