Our next episode will be our coverage of a local science outreach program called Science Pub. This event is held the last Thursday of every month at the Lebanon Salt Hill Pub and is funded by Dartmouth’s School of Graduate and Advanced Studies. This event hosts a panel of researchers to explain their research to local community members. After their descriptions, community members are given the chance to ask questions and have conversations with the panel members.

From online multi-player games, to hopscotch, to board games, to Candy Crush, games are universal. Although we often think of games as a fun pastime, they can be so much more. Games can be harnessed as a powerful social tool to create interventions for a range of social issues, from combating bias to getting people to recycle. We see elements of games showing up in digital technologies we use on a regular basis, and can use them as a platform for transforming education.

How can we use games to address social issues? What role d…o computer games have in our children’s classrooms? What are the effects of “gamification” on how we interact with each other, work, play, and learn? Come along to this month’s Science Pub and find out.

Panel Members:
Gili Freedman: Postdoctoral Scholar in the Tiltfactor lab. Founded and led by Mary Flanagan, the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Tiltfactor designs games that lead to positive social change—reducing sexual assault on campuses, raising climate change awareness, diminishing gender bias—that are also fun to play.

Luke Stark: post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at Dartmouth College, and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Marilyn Lord: history teacher at Kimball Union Academy, Meriden NH, and founder of EdPlay.org . https://www.edplay.org/