KEY
Bold:	Interviewer
Regular:	Respondent
[ ]:	Uncertain word(s)

Good morning. 
Hi. 
Can you see me?
Yes, very well.
And you can hear me.
Excellent, loud and clear; how about you?
I can hear you, you’re a little soft, but you’re coming in clearly so it’s absolutely fine.  
Okay, I’ll try to maybe speak up a bit, and maybe move a little bit closer.  Is that better?
It is a little better and I’ve turned mine up as well. 
Right, just to let you know before we actually introduce each other and talk to each other, I’m already recording okay?  Is that okay, just the audio recording, just so you know?
Okay, thank you. 
Great, well it’s wonderful to meet you and thank you once again for giving this opportunity, which is wonderful, I’m very pleased that we can have this opportunity to talk together and find out something about you and your work and what you do. 
Well I am so excited; can I ask how you even heard about me?
Yes, I can, I actually checked out on the, the calendar for the talks at the Serious Play Conference.  So I had a look through the schedule there and I saw you and I saw your background and I thought, well this could – and then I looked a little bit at what I saw online and I thought, you might be a really interesting person for us to talk to.  
Okay. 
So that’s how I got to you. 
Okay, before we actually start I’ll just run through a little bit of introduction with you, just to let you know how we’ll work this.  So as you know, you’ve seen the information about the project, so we’re interviewing a number of people in different areas in education, but also in game development and also in research, and also policy making and so forth, to get their ideas, their views and their perspectives on games and gaming in various sectors, including education and also in society in general.  So we’re presently doing the round, focusing mainly on education, educators and so forth.  
As far as the interview goes, you know of course, we explained that all the information is going to be anonymous, okay, so there won’t be any references to – the recordings will be stored, archived online, they will be available, but they will be anonymous audio recordings, and the transcripts as well will be made anonymous, okay?  So, and as far as the, how we’re going to work it today, this morning, is, what we’ll do is this, we have sort of outlined some, about six general themes, so we’re going to just, I’ll take you through each of those themes, I have a few slides just to let you know which theme we’re looking at and we’re going to talk a little bit about each of those themes.  
Once we’ve discussed a little bit of the aspects and issues of each of these themes, I’m going to show you a second slide with a theme, but in this case with a few key words, and these are key words that refer to some topics and issues and things that have come up in the course of the project.  So just so you can see those there and see, we can look at them together to see if we think we’ve covered some of those, if you’ve mentioned them, if there are other aspects that you’d like to talk about.  
Okay. 
So that’s more or less how we’ll work it, so I’ll just show you those slides and you’ll be able to see them. 
As far as the interview goes, I mean it’s totally relaxed and clear, there’s no problems, you can take as much time as you like, because it’s not, we don’t have to present any of this in a journalistic fashion, so they’ll be a transcript and so on, so you can take as much time as you like to collect your thoughts about things, that’s no problem.  You can change your mind, you can ask for clarification from me, whatever you like.  You can also, if you like, you can also, you prefer not to answer any question, that’s totally up to you, so feel free to come in as you like, as we go through the interview. 
Okay.
Just a word of warning, we did say forty-five minutes, but we’ve found so far that they’ve tended to run to just about an hour, so is that okay for you?
Absolutely.  I cleared an hour and just wanted to check if that was, did you think that was enough time. 
That’s great, thanks a lot yeah, fantastic. 
And they’ll be a bit of time for you at the end to add in any of your thoughts or reflections, or comments, I’ll give you some space for that when we reach the end.  
So what I’ll do now is I’ll just, I’ll quickly put up the first of these topics, which is in this case, I’ll just ask you to see if you can – can you see that come through there?
I’m only seeing you, I’m not seeing a slide.  Oh now I see a slide.  
Okay.  Can you still the videos of yourself and of me?
Ah-ha, actually I can see me.  
Oh you’ve lost me have you, oh well. 
Well I can see you in the corner, so you’re good.  
So what I’d thought we’d do, if you could just start off by introducing yourself, that is saying who you are, what it is you do, where you work, what you do in your work and how that relates to games.  
Okay, do you want me to do that right now?
Yeah, that’d be great. 
So I’m [anonymised], I work for [anonymised], I serve fifty-nine school districts and what I was hired to do in my job is, I am a science coordinator, so I work with those fifty-nine school districts in the transition in science education, and with the next-gen science standards.   And then something else that came along was, we wrote a grant to start implementing computer science and we were given approximately, a little less than, but approximately $400,000 for a year to work on implementing computer science in those fifty-nine school districts, so now that has become part of my job.  We are fairly new in our region, in some of our schools, we range from the second largest school in the district, Spokane Public, to some of the smallest districts, that are rural, and we are working on integrating computer science into those districts, and of course every district is different so we are working on customising that bid for different districts.  
And how gaming has come into that is, we’ve actually written some grants and been awarded to start working on what we’re calling gamification of classrooms and bringing gaming back into schools as a way to teach basically anything.  My expertise is of course science, but I’ve also worked with ELA, English, language arts, I’ve worked in math, so we actually have a grant, a three-year grant to work gaming in, systematically into two different school districts, so that it will go school-wide and the other thing we are doing is we are systematically looking at putting gaming into classrooms across the fifty-nine school districts.  So I’ve gone out and given presentations, I’ve done presentations to superintendent groups, and so I’ve now started to become ‘the gaming lady’ is what they’re calling me; so I get contacted by schools and sometimes I go out and work with kids, which I’ve done.  I also go out and work with teachers and like I said, I’ve worked with the administration, so this whole concept of gaming and how to implement gaming in the classrooms has become like something we are doing within our fifty-nine school districts. 
Great.  You mentioned being ‘the gaming lady’ does that apply to [anonymised] as a person, as well, let’s say outside her─
I don’t want to answer – no, I’m okay to answer this (laughs).  So I do not consider myself a gamer; with my girls, I have two daughters that are twenty-six and twenty-seven now, and when they were growing up I didn’t allow video games in my home, but really kind of what happened to me is, kids, you know, I taught seventh grade for fifteen years, middle school, and my seventh graders were coming in and they’d tell me what they did all weekend long, which is playing Minecraft, or you know.  So basically what happened is, I started wanting to use gaming to teach because they were interested in it, not because I was interested in it; and I got hired by a gaming company, Filmic Games to come out and be a science consultant, and so my point is, I bought an Xbox and I was having kids help me learn to game, and I can tell you ugly, ugly stories (laughs) about – just in fact, this young man named Liam, he would try to come and help me every – I told him, I can only do fifteen minutes at a time, because it is hard for me, it is very hard for somebody who’s never done that before, and you know; I’m big into games, like chess and chequers and I’m into thought games, but I, this video gaming thing, no, absolutely no.  
So this young man named [anonymised], he’s a seventh grader and I kind of said, come in every morning for fifteen minutes and help me, and pretty soon after about two weeks he walked up to me in the hall and he goes, ‘I can tell you’re avoiding me’ and I’m like, ‘I am, I don’t want to do this, it’s hard’.  It is very hard, and those controllers, right, there’s seven-thousand buttons and I’ve only got ten fingers and it has been a, it has been a – it was hard.  So then what’s really interesting is, when I came to work at ESD-101, my job was to implement science right, and that’s what I, I mean I love science, it’s my passion, so what’s interesting is, I kind of had thought, okay, I have been doing this work at gaming, I was at the White House Game Jam and whatever bad, I just thought, you know what, that’ll not be part of my work.  Well people, when I came to ESD people kind of, that reputation came with me, and the next thing I know people are asking for that information and so my superintendent sat down with me and basically he said, ‘I think we should do this’ and I said, ‘oh my gosh, this is big work’, but he said, ‘I think we should have it be part of what we’re doing’ and sure enough it’s part of what we’re doing.  
So I actually head it up with the VR equipment in my office and line up to use it (laughs) and I have now, I mean it’s just, it’s just been a really great transition, but it’s also, I’m still knee-deep in the middle of becoming a gamer.  I am no, by no means, you know, I’m learning to play to Minecraft’ we’re working with Microsoft now and their Minecraft EU department and yeah, so I’m learning, but if you’re asking me if I’m a gamer, I would still say, no (laughs).  I’m very slow at everything. 
So you just mentioned interestingly about making, talking with your colleagues at a policy level and an administrative and organisational level, making it part of what you do in your districts.  What sort of areas in making it part of what you do in your education districts, what sort of areas were you looking at in terms of the sort of outcomes you were hoping to get to, from that situation?
I’m not sure – let me tell you the question I just heard you ask, how we’re using gaming in districts and to what purpose, is that what I’m hearing you ask?
Yeah, what sort of things did you have in mind for making that, taking that step?
You know different districts, obviously our districts all run differently, right, and they have local control.  So let me give you some examples, and if this doesn’t hit the mark, please let me know.  So I am out working with one district and it’s very rural and I think they’re about twenty, twenty-three teachers and para-pros, a para-pro is like an assistant to a classroom, and they are wanting to implement computer science, which by the way our House Bill 1813, mandated a year ago and said, all kids K12 will get some experience in computer science.  So they didn’t obviously tell us what they looked like specifically, they just said, we’re going to do this, so I’m out working with the district on this computer science, and looking at codec work and ozobots and Scratch and some other ways, because this is an elementary situation, and one of the things that happened is, the superintendent came up to me afterwards and he said, ‘you know [anonymised], this is all great, but is there anything you know about working fun stuff into after-school programmes, because we want kids to want to be here?’.  So I introduced them and I said, ‘yeah, there are lots of gaming things you could do’, so Gamestar Mechanic is one of them, and that’s a way, you know, it’s very inexpensive and it’s a way to get kids coding through gaming.  
So he and I are now working on ways to get gaming into an after-school programme, because obviously, I mean we don’t have standards around an after-school programme and it’s just kids completely interested. 
So another way, and by the way ‘the gaming lady’ is not how I name myself, but I went to a district and I was doing a science presentation and I had two six-grade teachers stop me and they were like, hey you’re the gaming lady right, and I said – they said, that’s what everybody’s calling you, and I’m like, okay good (laughs).  Good to know, because – I said, but here’s what I know, I know how to work with kids.  So in their case I sat down with two six-grade teachers and I said, you know what, there’s a way to implement gaming in Scratch, into a science curriculum, but if you could also integrate it into an ELA programme and in social studies, and of course elementary is an integrated situation, so I sat down and worked with them to create some themes and some ways that they could use gaming, like actually to meet standards in their classroom.  
So does that hit the target that you’re asking for?
Yes, definitely.  Sorry, just one thing, the ELA is literacy?
ELA is, yes, it’s English, language arts, what we used to call English when I was in high school, so yes, I apologise for that acronym.  
It’s perfectly okay.  So great, okay.  So that’s given us a good idea of your position in terms of games and your background let’s say in games.  Here are some of the, now I’m just showing some of the key words that came up in this theme in terms of, okay we’ve talked about your experiences, also the context you work in and also the impact that you, areas of impact that you are looking at in those different areas, and you also mentioned, you mentioned gamification, what about those other types of games, serious games and entertainment games?
Okay when you say, ‘what about them’ do you want me to tell you some of my experiences with them?
How you see them?
So I need to teach – when I was a teacher, and even now, my work is around science education and the reason gaming became important to me isn’t just because kids were engaged with it, there are themes, subject areas and concepts that are very difficult in science to teach; very, very small microscopic concepts, like bacteria and viruses, very difficult to teach.  I mean you can show videos and this and that, but to have kids actually interact with that information is a bit difficult, you know, because you don’t want to – I mean we can grow bacteria, which we’ve done in my classroom, but there are other things I would like them to know through experience, you know, without actually giving them all viruses and so one of the reasons I started using games in education was because there were concepts like, that are very difficult to understand.  
Anything that takes up a tremendous amount of space, like the universe and the solar system, is very much easier for me to explain if kids can get in and muck around with it.  So one of the games that came, that Filmic Games produced was Planet Mechanics, where kids could go in and see, when they mucked around with this planet, the distance to the sun and the angle of the tilt of the earth, or the planet that they were messing with.  You teach concepts quite readily when kids could actually see that, that’s not something I could do in a classroom, right.  I mean I can come up with models, but models fall short.  
One of the other things was generation after generation of plant growth, so another game we played had to do with dominant recessive genes and plant growth, and how that worked.  It was really powerful to take some games and be able to create a situation that I couldn’t normally in a classroom, or even through models because I’m a big hands-on kind of a teacher, so if I can get kids to touch it, feel it, see it, that’s my goal.  So I would not use games if I could find a better way to give kids experiences, but there are some ways that gaming and game based learning taught kids things that I just, like I said, generations and generations of plants, I can’t grow them, even inside a 180-day school year, so kids were able to grow generation after generation just in a split second, and that was really powerful.  One of the things I liked about using games was I could experiment myself with the game, so there times when I would take a game and I would present it before I had even presented any information to see what the retention rate was for kids, and then I would take that same game and frontload some of the information, or some of the vocabulary; but what was really powerful about games is that the games that I tended to use had the vocabulary built in, and kids were needing to use that vocabulary, because you know, we don’t teach kids vocabulary, just give them something to memorise right, you teach them that so that we can have conversations and know that we’re talking about the same thing.  So that had been really powerful in some of the plant games. 
Another thing that I would use gamification, or game based learning for was also things that were very costly, you know, there are things that, like catapults, it was great to have kids engineer a catapult, but once they started doing iterations of that catapult it gets very, very expensive in a classroom, whereas if you can go in and show them a game where they can build one and use different materials and have different tensions and force and that kind of thing, then they can muck around in that and then by the time they actually engineer one, three-dimensionally in the real world, they have the language and they also have that foundation of what they’re trying to achieve.  
That’s great, and that brings us very, very neatly into the next sematic area we’re looking at, which is actually looking more specifically in games and learning, and I think you’ve mentioned quite a lot there about sort of experiential learning, there’s an affordance, and a capability of game based learning and you’ve mentioned a lot in terms of simulation and so forth, these different sorts of facilitations that you can get and added values to game based learning.  I’d just like, if you could add on to that, if there are other sorts of added values you think you can get using games, and perhaps also some limitations?
Okay, so first I’m going to just, another way for learning.  So we talked a lot about game based learning, and another thing, I have a colleague who has taken his classroom, a six-grade science classroom and actually gamified the whole experience.  So I want to talk a little bit about that, because I help present with him every year, in fact we’re doing another presentation in August, and that’s another way that this game and learning kids engage, they just engage when a) it’s fun, and b) when it, and I’m not saying we need to make everything fun, but what I’m saying is, if you can it makes it works for kids in a great way.  And the other thing that gamification of classrooms can do is give kids choices and then they feel like, you know, they have a voice in how and what they learn.  
So one of the ways that gamification was implemented was taking a whole unit, or a whole set of curricular standards and gamifine it, meaning you give badges, or you put it on a platform and then say, okay, you’re going to open up this, to open up this portal you need to read this document or this document and describe it, and then kids could have choices.  They could look at the two documents and say, you know what, I think I’d rather read about this part of genetics rather than that impact of genetics, and even though both articles can be genetically, foundationally based, kids can have their own choice as to what interests them.  And then, you know, you give badges and they get extra points for timing and this and that, and in the end, you know, they’re always assessed on the standards anyway, right.  
But one of the limits that I’ve found, even though we want to engage kids is this notion that kids always have to be entertained, because they don’t; we want to engage them and we want to do something interesting and make it fun and engaging for them, but that doesn’t mean that everyday has to be this fun and games thing, that’s absolutely not what it’s about.  Some of the limitations I think are, we had kids and they said that, they would just tell me, this is not the way I learn best, and that’s okay, because I would make and find other ways to engage them as well.  you know, you’ve got a gambit of kids and you’re trying to hit the mainstream and you’re trying to somehow connect to all of them.  So even though this game based learning is, I think engaging and I think kids respond to it at a greater percentage, you still have those outliers of kids that say, you know what, this isn’t really how I learn best, and so you also need to find ways to meet those needs as well.  
The other thing I would tell you is that all models have inherent misconceptions in them, there’s just no way around that, and that’s true for any experience I give kids in a science classroom, and it’s also true for any kind of model built on a game, so you don’t ever have the perfect model, so it’s really important when you’re using games if you’re using games that have already been designed to know what those limitations are, so that you can, either explain them to students or get ready to make up for that misconception. 
Sure, so there’s a moderating factor, or a moderating role in terms of an educator, facilitating those processes, is that what you would say in this respect?
Yes, and I would also caution that I have known some teachers that think that, oh let’s just put the game in front of the kid and then I can have the day off, that is nothing close to using game based learning.  
Yeah, indeed, and I’ve just put up the slide with games and learning, with some of those, again some of those key words, which I think you’ve covered quite well, quite exhaustively in the sense of the terms, and the types of games again, and talking about the motivational factors and so forth, and you mentioned some of the opportunities for knowledge building in terms of impact and things. 
How about the aspect of things like cooperation, competition, I’m particularly interested in terms of gamification, you mentioned points, badges, perhaps leader boards and so forth, how do you see that?
You know, I think if you’re putting those words up because I think my favourite experience when I first started down this road, my misconception around video games was, I’m going to start down this road and these kids are going to start playing this video game and they’re going to do it in isolation and they’re going to be glued to their screens and that is not what I want as an educator.   I want to instil collaboration and competition can be a good thing, it can also be a detrimental thing; when kids get too competitive, what I find interesting, and I’ll go back to the competition, but what I found interesting is, so we started playing this video game, the very first one I did, and I watched and waited and you know what, those kids were collaborating naturally.  It was a natural collaboration and what I loved most is that when you get kids in a seventh grade classroom, kids generally stick with their friends or they group up by themselves, and what was really interesting around video games is those groups were shattered, those groups were no longer the groups.  It wasn’t about sitting or collaborating with your friends, it was about, who knows how to do the next level and how do I get that information from them (laughs).  
And so one of my favourite things is I had a student who’s on the autistic spectrum, and he really struggled to collaborate, it wasn’t, and kids struggled and he struggled, and so we had been trying to build that in and work with that all year long, right.  Well you put him in front of that video game and that was his super power and he had like four levels gone, like within minutes and what was great was, he then became the person everybody wanted to work with, because he could blaze through and he not only knew the content, he could deal with the content because he learnt by listening.  He also knew how to move through the game because it was inherent to him, it was this great experience; so the bottom line was, he became the super hero in that classroom. 
But my other favourite thing was, kids were like, I mean it was crazy, because here they are in front of a computer screen and they somehow knew that the kid across the classroom was on level five or four, wherever they were, and they would literally yell across the room, ‘hey, so and so, I hear you’re on level three or four, how did you do that’ and so the next thing you know this information is being shared class-wide and group-wide and nobody got left out, it wasn’t like anybody was hoarding the information, and then they all tried to start helping each other, and that happened consistently, every time I used a game, and I was really, pretty happy with that, it was like, you know, that was something I was worried about and I didn’t need to be, because students would collaborate around something that they wanted to accomplish as a class.  
The competition part was actually interesting to me because kids get really competitive with themselves and with each other, and yet they’re still willing to share the information, because even though they can get through level one, if they could help another kid get through level one, that kid might be able to get through level two better than they do, right, so it just became this classroom thing.  The other thing I noticed about it was, nobody wanted to collaborate with me, that was interesting to me.  Because I think they just saw me as this little old lady who didn’t play video games (laughs) or games, and so even through the content, because I’m a science person, I know the content, they still were not asking me those questions, they were still choosing to work with each other over working with me, and in fact at one point I remember, most of the times in classrooms I’d say, can somebody please have a crisis because I’m feeling left out, like I want to play too and nobody wants to play, I mean I was the one that was left out, which actually was a pretty cool thing.  
But competition I find interesting, the kids I think, in my experience, that have the hardest time with competition are actually gifted students, because what I would find is they are highly, highly competitive and winning kind of means everything, and I guess, I just found that really interesting as far as what kids were doing, and just where they were competitively.  So they were, and what’s really interesting is, if you, if I gave them like a prize, if I said something like, hey we’re playing for this mini chocolate bar, holy cow, I stopped doing that because it was like, you’ve got it, it’s a piece of chocolate, let’s just everybody take a deep breath, you know.  I just found it really, really interesting. 
Well it’s very interesting that you brought up a number of those reactions, I guess personal, individual reactions, in terms of attitudes and ways of behaving with games, because that is the next thing that we’re now moving onto, which is games and the individual.  So perhaps even on a very general level about individual, not only in a strictly classroom situation, but the way different people may respond.  You talked about your daughters, yourself, other people, the kids, the teachers, the sorts of reactions you must hear in your position I guess as, essentially as a policy maker as well, different reactions to the different expectations people have about games and how different people can react to that, both in a positive and perhaps also in the negative sense.  
Yeah, so – and please tell me if I’m hitting your target, but really some of the things I’ve come across is the individual teachers that I find most willing are elementary teachers and I think probably because, and I haven’t done any research, I don’t have data, I’m just saying as I walk through and working with teachers; elementary teachers, I think, and this is just my supposition right, so they are already integrate everything anyway, they’re teaching everything anyway, so to add a game to it was really, they seemed very, very open to it.  
One of the middle schools, and I think what happens is, we – I think there’s this thought about what gamification or game based play means.  Really interesting, so this middle school were working with, one of them; met with us to start off this research project, we’re doing this three-year research project, and it was really funny because we said, at the very first meeting, you know what, could you please bring the people that really want to participate, we want the frontrunners.  We’re not trying to convince anybody, we don’t want to try and convince anybody right off, we just kind of want to build a base at the school.  
So they brought about, I don’t know, nine teachers and an administrator and oh my gosh, it was really fun to start talking about gaming and gamification because they, a lot of them were like, you know, this just sounds really intriguing but we don’t know what it is, and then we started probing and saying, well do you ever play games in your classrooms, well yeah, well what kind of games, well I made up this one game where kids, you know, did X, Y and Z, well we made up this one thing; and I’m talking the art teacher had done it, the math teacher, the science teacher (laughs) and then we start talking about, you guys, that is game based learning.  Like what you’re doing already is game based learning, we just want to expand it to the whole school and we want to do it systematically, we want a systems change, that’s what our goal is.  So it was really interesting what adults maybe think of as game based play, or game based learning, and what they think it is and what they think it isn’t, because they minimise what they’re already doing, and you go, that’s really great stuff you’re doing around, in base learning for kids.  
I think some of the things I found interesting is, I presented to some superintendents and some board members, and the word ‘gamification’ threw everybody off.  I think, they were like, you know [anonymised], it just sounds like you’re just trying to just have fun and not do any learning, and so that’s one of the misconceptions out there, that we’re working on piece by piece.  
So we went and presented actually, I went and presented to our board, using Ozobots and some ways that you can programme them and still make it a competition game type thing.  That was really eye-opening and they said, you know, if we could just get past that gamification, and I heard that at many levels on the policy level.  
I also do some work at the state level, with Stem and career based learning, and people say, if we could get, that ‘gamification’ throws them off, and the situation, and I tell them, you know we could change the name, gamification in our region, but the bad news is, that is the word; we didn’t invent it, that’s the word people use when they are talking about this thing we do.  So changing it, you can call it anything you like, so that has actually been a little bit of a roadblock, I think, not a big roadblock just enough that people ask about it and then we have to describe it, so that they feel, oh okay.  And we make sure we really explain it when we apply for grants, we had applied for an I3 grant that actually made it through the first two, I think the first two rounds and then didn’t make it through the last round, but we made sure when we said, it was around gaming in classrooms, that we explained what we were talking about. 
I was wondering whether you get other sorts of reactions, perhaps even, say from parents or schools and whatever, with things like, with games, thinking about things like addiction and so forth, do these sorts of issues arise with the way people maybe react to games and respond?
You know what’s interesting, so I just want to go back to my teaching experience because I have some stories around that.  So when I first started doing, I started a gamification class, it was an elective, because I just wanted to give it a shot, right, and I had two administrators that both by – I mean I literally shot them an email and said, I want to try this for an elective and one of them said, yeah we could do that, you know my principal, yeah we could do that next year; while my vice-principal is a gamer and he looked at the curriculum for it and said to me, yeah let’s do this next quarter, and I said, next quarter is next week (laughs), and he goes, yeah you’ll be fine.  I said, I don’t even have a computer lab set up for that timeframe, and he – I love this man by the way, but he says to me, so are you still standing here, go and make that happen (laughs), okay.  
What was great about it was, I walked into the library and I said, ‘hey I’m going to need the library in fifth period’, you know, and the librarian, named Johnny, said, ‘hey no problem’ and I said, ‘just like that, no problem’, and he said, ‘[anonymised] if you need it for class, we’re going to clear it for you’, and then he says, ‘and by the way, what’re you doing’ and I said, ‘oh we’re going to teach this gaming class’ and he goes, ‘can I come’, I said, ‘sure’.  And then he’s like, ‘what’re you going to name it?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know, I just found out ten minutes ago I was teaching it’ and I’m telling you, I’d go back to my class to teach, a science class and he comes running down, and he’s like, ‘[anonymised], we’ve named your class, it’s going to be called..’ give me a minute, and I’ll think of it, but he goes, ‘oh Gaming Garage, the Gaming Garage’, and he said, ‘and I have a logo for it and everything’ (laughs).  
It was, I mean it was hilarious and everybody jumped in, with one exception, and that was the library aid, really did not want kids, because after we built the curriculum, one of the problems that happened was, kids wanted to be in the library lab all the time, like during lunches, on their free time and they were – and then, word spread quite quickly, we had about 490 students in our middle school, word spread quickly so then everybody wanted it.  So then we had to deal with that.  
One of the things that was interesting though is, parents, I did get emails from parents and calls from parents and their issue wasn’t addiction, their issue was, ‘[anonymised], did you send home homework for this class’ and I would say, ‘no’, and they said, ‘well my kid won’t get off the computer at home and says it’s for a class’ (laughs) and I said, ‘it is for a class, but I don’t, it’s elective, I haven’t sent home homework’, so that was a really interesting thing that happened.  
And I found this completely humorous, one of the kids in my class decided he wanted to go to, there’s a place out here in Seattle called the [0:40:36] in Technologies and they offer summer camps and my, the child, the student that was in my class his dad was our assistant superintendent, and the assistant superintendent called me one day and he said, ‘[anonymised], we have a problem’ and I said, ‘okay’, and he said, ‘my son now only wants to go to the University of Washington and I’m a WSU graduate and that’s going to be a problem for me’ (laughs), because the University of Washington has a great computer science programme, and so I did tell him, and he was totally kidding, but I did say, you know, you hired me to serve your son not to serve you, so sorry about that, and UW and WSU are obviously rivals, so no, I didn’t get a lot of negative parent feedback.  
I did get calls, but they were more like, questioning calls, like, ‘really, my son has to be on the computer for eight hours tonight?’ and so once I’d cleared that up it was, you know what I’m saying, that was really their only question. 
Great, well let’s have a look here at some of the key words that came up in this area, we’ve mentioned addiction, you’ve also mentioned the engagement and immersion factor, I think that demonstrates, that exemplifies very much that aspect, what you were just talking about.  
How about the physical activity area?  There are some concerns, or some positives things?
I think there are positive things, what – oh my gosh, and I’m sorry I haven’t touched this one in a while, oh Zombie Run, so we have a person out here who decided to start using Zombie Run, and he’s actually become a marathoner now because of it (laughs), so whenever, you know there are lots of things you can do around gaming, and physical activity.  So at one point I had an outdoor classroom, and we would do things like Geocashing and we would do things like treasure hunts and things like hunting down different species out and around our classroom, using gaming and gamification.  That wasn’t an actual video game but it was a way to put in, you know, phone use, or GPS use and of course at that time I had all the GPS units instead of telephones and now I would use the kids as phones, so there are ways to gamify being outdoors and doing physical things that we did incorporate in my science classroom, especially in the spring, and not so much in the winter as much, but in ways like that.  And it was, I mean I would still, it wasn’t my super power and I would say that I have learnt a lot more ways, you know, the Pokeman-Go movement really helped with that and if I had still been sitting in a classroom I would’ve monopolised on that as well. 
What about the area with the cognitive abilities, and perception and things like that, problem-solving for example, I think you mentioned earlier.  
Yeah, because these are one of my favourite, you know I used to work for a NASA contractor, we worked on the Shuttle programmes and the missile programmes back in the day, and so when I got into education one of my biggest concerns was, you know, we’re not teaching kids problem-solving, we’re having them read the book and they answer questions, five through, ten on the back, and that doesn’t work for anything, right.  So one of my favourite things about game playing is what it does for problem-solving, and that’s true for almost every game that kids play, it’s about solving the problem.  So, and as far as memory, when you allow – this is my experience in classrooms again, not research based for me, but when you allow kids to solve their own problems they don’t have to, their memory is much better.  
So let me give an example, so we play a game around figuring our dominant and recessive genes and basically, we reinvent Mendel’s experiments; and one of the things that happened was, before I taught it this way I would have kids look at vocabulary around dominant and recessive and this is just going to be a quick example, but after we ended up playing the game and I had kids figuring out how genetics works by having them actually have peas in their hand and predict what happens, and cross-breeding them, what happened is, I have conversations with kids around their understanding of what’s happening with that, and so then we introduced, well you know what, you’re saying that this gene is stronger, but we need words so that we understand what that means as geneticists, and so we came up with the word ‘dominant recessive’ and after I started teaching that way, one-hundred percent, and this, every year this was true, one-hundred percent of my kids could explain the vocabulary to me.  They didn’t, because they were scaffolding it on an experience they had, rather than trying to memorise something, that it wasn’t scaffolded yet, right.  
And as far as problem-solving, you know, problem-solving is problem-solving, so let me give you an example, so little Jacob, it’s my favourite example, little Jacob, he’s trying to solve a problem around a game on a computer and he wants help because he is stuck, and it was really cute because he calls on his classmates and they’re all knee-deep in their own stuff and it’s not they don’t want to help Jacob, but they’re like, Jacob just give me a minute, well patience in children, right, so finally I say to Jacob, ‘you know, I’m here’, and Jacob looks at me like, okay then, so, and I said, ‘no Jacob, really, let me sit down with you and talk through this’ and he said, ‘okay’, and I said, what have you tried, and he said, and I don’t need to give you a specific, ‘but I’ve tried A, I’ve tried B and I’ve tried C’, and I said, ‘okay, so the next thing you’re going to want to do is tell me what the next smart, what’s the next best thing to do’, and he’s like, ‘well I could try a combination’, okay so he tried, it was great, because he tries a combination of A-B or A-C, I don’t know what he tried, right, but all I know is it worked, and for five whole seconds Jacob looked up at me, like I was the smartest person on the planet, and he looks at me and he goes, he says to me, ‘Miss Schrader how did you know?’ and I said, ‘because problem-solving is problem-solving, right, whether you’re building a shuttle or whether you are trying to figure out how to move something forward on a game, problem-solving is just problem-solving, you just process of elimination, go through’ and so, I mean I just, that problem-solving piece is my favourite piece.   The problem-solving and the collaboration around game playing is my favourite piece, because what’s interesting to me around games and why I would want to use them is, when I gave them a science problem, kids when they first walk in, it doesn’t work once and they just walk away from it, that’s not true in gaming, if something doesn’t work once, man it makes them want to try harder and harder and harder, and it’s my favourite part about game play.  
Right, good.  I think that’s really looked at that in quite good depth and detail then, from that particular theme.  So maybe now we can move onto another area that’s slightly different in terms of games and ethics; I don’t know if you’ve had any ethics, what you would consider ethical issues, come up in your own experience or heard of ethical questions that have arisen through using games, playing games, or the games themselves. 
You know what, unless you can give me an example of what, because I think I, I mean I know what I mean when you say ethics, I have not encountered anything that I, that comes to mind when you say, games and ethics.  So I don’t know if you’re talking about kids cheating, I don’t know if you’re talking about─
That could be one aspect.  Just for example in general terms, in terms of games, 360 degrees, also entertainment games, there are debates about things like say violence, aggression and so forth, and there are other concerns perhaps about the way people are represented, or not represented, or misrepresented in games, sort of identities that evolve around games, these sorts of things.  Are these issues that ever arise for you?
I’m going to say – I just, that nothing is ringing for me at all. 
Okay. 
You know, and as far as the cheating in games, you know what, that’s a hard question for me, because I used to, I told kids every year, all the time, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.  You know, your job is to find a way around a system, because that’s what’s going to move you forward in life, right.  Because this in the box thinking doesn’t really work, and I’m not saying, cheating like to hurt someone, or cheating on a test, I’m saying that when I give you a set of parameters your job is to push those, your job is to push and play within my rules, but figure out how to get around them, because really that’s problem-solving and critical thinking. 
So, but as far as – violence does, I will be honest, violence does concern me, but what I’ve found and that, what I have found is that parents are allowing kids to play games that I would not allow young kids to play (laughs).  
But you mentioned at the beginning that you banned video games from your household with your daughters. 
Yeah, I did.  
For quite a long period, yeah?
Well, and here’s the thing, so my daughters are twenty-six and twenty-seven, and I just didn’t think it was valuable and my husband and I agreed, you know these Xboxes, and I think it was PlayStation at the time, that they were given a game, like a little handheld Gameboy or something at one point from their grandparents, and we allowed it, I mean we, I mean it was a Christmas gift and we allowed it, but we all kind of played together and we all kind of competed together and it kind of lost its allure, I don’t know, I’d say within six months.  
And what’s really interesting now is both my daughters are gamers, in fact one of them is a pretty serious gamer, she just graduated with her masters in biology; we went down to Tucson and I had her trying to have me play Skyrim and oh my gosh, again, I did about thirty minutes and then I just said I, and she is really, really good at it, so I guess I didn’t scar them for life, they both play games.  But yeah, I just didn’t – you know what, when my girls were littler, I just thought, you know what, this, they can find better, more productive things to do (laughs), and by the way, if it makes you feel better I am catching heck about it, because you know now I’ve spoken at, I think I’ve spoken at the White House two or three times around it, and my daughters are like, sure mom, sure (laughs).  
And I don’t know if I’d feel different, and I think I would because now I have a little granddaughter, who’s only five months old, but I’m already thinking, yeah, we need to hook her up with some VR (laughs).  So again I, that’s what I have around ethics, it does concern me and it does concern me when kids do nothing but play video games, which is how I got into this mess, right, you know, kids were coming to school and I’d be like, what did you do all weekend, oh we played Minecraft ‘til four AM and I just thought, can’t you find something to do.  So again, I have my own personal internal battle around it, right, because I want to meet kids where they are, although I still think, and like I said, if I could find a better way to teach them than a game I will do it, hands-on experience I think is much better for kids, but I also know the kids engage with it and that, here we are in the twenty-first century. 
Right, well you’ve mentioned there, we talked about a few of those areas, the violence and agressivity and some concerns sometimes about things like gender and race, or age, or whatever, in terms of representation.  You mentioned inclusion, about for example, having kids with problems, say like autism and so forth, so there is actually some latitude there for somehow scaffolding or helping them to integrate together, to interact and integrate with their classmates and so forth.  So that’s an inclusion dimension to it perhaps. 
And you know, absolutely, in fact – and again some of the kids I’m talking about that was the way that they found entertainment on their own time, and I knew that.  So I mean I – this one young man I’m speaking about, and I’m not – it was a tough situation, meaning when he was in my class I couldn’t even have him sitting next to anyone because he physically could not manage it.  And when you talk about all the science equipment, he even struggled with coloured pencils, because he could stab people, and not meanly, he just, you know, you picture second grader, right, in their social skills they touch other people and they, and in seventh grade that just doesn’t work, and so this child just struggled socially and yet when these video games came and I was doing some of them, he was able to hone in and find a way to communicate without any physical damage to anyone, and it worked for him.  
Okay, well good.  In that case, we’ll move on now to the next theme, we’ve still got a couple to go, so I think we’ll manage to get through them.  
Looking a little bit more generally in terms of games and society in general, are there any sort of thoughts or reflections, particularly you’ve had in terms of how games are positioned in society, what changes perhaps for good, for bad, or positive or negative they might’ve had in society?
You know, and I think with anything you have the good, you have the bad, right, and I also think that good and bad are contracts that we make up around what we think is good and what we think is bad, right.  So when I look at games in society, I know right now games are being built – because one of the last times I was at the White House, I got to play a couple of games that taught social behaviour to children, and maybe even adults, that don’t pick up on social cues.  So I think that games, like anything, can be used for really great motivation.  I’m sorry that when I think about all these people that go in The World of Warcraft, by the way I’ve never played, and they, then they collaborate around a common goal, it gives them ways to do that that might not otherwise be available to them.  You know, and even though I don’t quite understand it, I’ve watched it, I don’t quite understand that piece, I’m an extrovert and I find other ways to make that happen in my life, and I’m not saying these people don’t, I’m just saying, if that’s what engages them and that’s what works for them.  
So let me give you one example of ways I think it’s productive, so I’ve been reading this research on play and creativity, and it talks about, during play, whatever your brain thinks play is, that’s when you can be the most creative.  So a friend of mine said to me, we’re working on putting together a project and he said to me, ‘hey let’s get on Minecraft’, okay, I’d never been on Minecraft, and I said, ‘I don’t think it’s a good plan, can’t we just call each other on the phone’ and he said, ‘no, really, we are going to do this’.  So we get on this Minecraft game and we’re playing Dual and I don’t know how to play, but he’s walking me through it, and during the course of building this world in Minecraft, he and I are also talking about this project we’re working on, and so I’m scribbling notes on the side, playing Minecraft, scribbling notes, blah-blah-blah, seriously, we started playing at 5pm and I looked up and it was after 8.30.
Wow. 
And one of the things I thought about that was, first of all I’d never stay on a phone for three and a half hours, that’d make me nuts.  And by the time we were done, I looked, and I had a, I had pages of notes around the project we were going to create.  
So my point is, I think that it can be used in a really positive manner and I’m not the end-all, be-all, I don’t know quite how all that works, but I think there are great games to be made.  I’m working with a lady in, she’s at a pharmacy school here, for WSU, and I went down and she and I are talking about game simulations, and they use simulations in order to teach pharmaceutical students how to give drugs and what to look for, so they’re using the gaming, and nobody gets hurt, right, in the process.  I mean the fake person dies, or doesn’t, but you can teach kids a powerful thing around pharmaceuticals and triage without actually having somebody’s life on the line.  
So those are some of the ways that I have started looking at it, and working in our region around it.  
Good.  So let’s then have a look at just a couple of those key words that have come up, related to games and society.  You talked about things like social change, social cohesion, the way people make, or less around a game or in the gaming community.   Other things that have been mentioned are things like marketing or cultural change, or innovation related to games.  Have you got any particular thoughts to these, do these raise any ideas for you in any of these aspects?
You know, other than, and looking at this and thinking about it, other than the whole cultural change, like I said, I think it’s very valuable when we start talking about how our young people are learning and what they’ve got going on, and as far as social change I think, you know, when I look at games that teach about, just social equity and justice and how those things work, especially right now in the United States, I feel like there’s a lot of unrest here due to our leadership at Washington DC, and I think that games could be used to teach empathy, and I know those are being built.  
Policy, and I’m not sure when I see the word ‘policy’ what you mean, but I can tell you that I have been working with a guy at a Senator Murray’s office and his idea, when we started talking about this gaming thing, he and I sat down and he is trying to build a game around how to teach people how policies are made, so that they can influence them.  I mean we walk around complaining about this policy, or that law, or that bill, but really not many people know how the political system works, and so those things are also, you know, being built.  So I didn’t know if you meant how to teach policy, or if you meant policy implementation around gaming.  Like I said, we have passed policy around computer science, the gaming thing, I think, would be a whole different ballgame.  
Right, okay, good.  Okay, well it’s now more or less starting to wrap things up at this point.  If there are any particular suggestions, recommendations and so forth that you in your position, your experience, that you would like to make, or have made, or think should be made to different stakeholders in, if you like, in the gaming landscape to take things forward, say to improve things, what – are there any particular suggestions you would make to someone if you could about how to take things forward?
You know I think, I don’t feel smart enough or knowledgeable enough to make suggestions, but I will say this, what I’ve learned in the eight years that I’ve gone on this path is that thinking outside the box is really powerful when it comes to gaming.  If you want to teach anything using games and game based play really it has become a powerful, powerful tool, and so in ways that I would have never, ever thought that games could make a difference.  Like teaching kids social cues, or how to read somebody’s facial expression, I, that would’ve never hit my mind, so I guess my only, my last thought, or my thought is, anything that can be thought of that we’re trying to teach anyone, children, adults, I think it can be done through gaming and gamification, but I think it’s going to take thinking outside the box, or any box that I’ve ever been in, that’s for sure. 
Here’s a list of some of the key words, or some of the different stakeholders if you like in the gaming landscape, so it sounds like that last suggestion you were making is something that you would perhaps refer to all these different factors in gaming, in terms of thinking outside the box, or thinking of things from an alternate angle if you like. 
You know, and I, I’m trying to think of anything that I would add to that, but I can’t.  But I will tell you that as a whole picture thinker, you know, so I’m involved in policy making in my state, and I’m involved with education and I’m involved with research, and parents, and working with developers.  I guess my thought is, there’s no way to leave all of these people out, there’s no way to leave all of these groups out, it’s a whole picture kind of thing where everybody needs to be playing, and everybody needs to be included in the conversations, right, and when we talk about educators, I’m talking pre-K, all the way up to higher ed, everybody should be playing and everybody should be sitting at the table talking about how to make it work.  
So do you imagine a sort of ideal table if you like with all of these different groups together being represented?
Yeah, and I see the word ‘players’ here and I just want to make sure that student voice would be included in that.  So players are not just adults, and kids know more than, than I think sometimes they’re given credit for, and I think that kids can also do more.  When I look at some things that teenagers are doing now, to impact the globe, I am hopeful and I am impressed, and a lot of them are doing it through technology and games, and it’s, I think it’s amazing.  
Great, okay.  Well on that very optimistic note, I’d just like to give you [anonymised] the opportunity if you like, if there’s anything that you would like to add, to what we’ve spoken about in terms of games or gaming?  Or any comments you’d like to make on the interview experience you’ve had yourself, and what you feel about it?
You know, well first of all thank you, the interview’s been fun.  
Good, I am glad. 
I was a little nervous because, honestly, I sometimes think, you know what, I just kind of got tossed into this world and I don’t, I’m not an expert, I just know that I’m trying to do the next thing to serve students and education.  So it’s been a wild ride for me, so I do have a question, so when all the research is done, do we get to take a look at it as participants?
Sure, definitely.  So what’s happening is as I said, we’re arranging and we’re carrying out these rounds of interviews with these different stakeholder groups.  These are going to be recorded, transcribed and analysed; and there’ll be an initial report which will be produced, be coming out the end of summer I guess, or – yeah, pretty much be the end of summer.  So you’ll definitely have access to that and you’ll be able to see, as I said, it’ll be obviously in anonymous form, but you’ll be able to see a breakdown and analysis of the sorts of positions and framings, and attitudes and so forth that different people from different perspectives have in the gaming landscape.  
So that will be, I suppose, the primary output from that, but this will be, it’s part of a slightly longer process whereby the idea is after having gained, let’s say the views and positions and attitudes from people like yourself, directly involved in the use of the games and the playing of games, and the producing of games, to distil some, let’s say some recommendations, some scenarios about taking things forward where people see teachings, where people see opportunities, and so the idea is to try to frame these into some tangible, if you like, scenarios or recommendations that may, we hope, have some resonance in the different areas of games and gaming that we’re addressing.  So also that will be another output that we’ll be following up with them, we’ll certainly make you aware of when these come out, we’ll let you know about that.  
And hopefully they’ll be something there that you’ll be able to take from that, which will be, I hope, helpful to you, or instructive or interesting in any case to your practice and to your obvious enthusiasm for games, because that’s something that really does shine through very strongly.  
Okay, well thank you.  Now, so how did you guys get interested in this research?  Am I allowed to ask that?
Oh you’re allowed to ask anything, that’s fine.  We, well there are three different groups in these European research projects, they’re usually formed – there’s a consortium of different groups that are either based in universities, research centres, and so forth, sometimes also in the corporate sector, or in small and medium enterprises and so forth.  We’ve, our institute, which is the Institute for Educational Technology has been doing research in that area for many decades now, and I suppose over the last decade, fifteen years or so, the game based learning and learning through games has become a very important thread, a very important research line for us, and also for the other two partners in the projects, that’s Leeds University as well, and also Breda University, so they’re all – but we’ve acquired a different background because Breda are more in terms of game developers, they educate in game development, Leeds has a more social if you like, social analysis perspective on games and culture, so the idea is putting these different perspective together to try to give some input also to the European Union in terms of what policy areas and what might be particularly promising for taking up all four, slightly realigning perhaps, or re-examining anyway, policy objectives and policy priorities in terms of what, the way that they seek to support research into gaming and also support for the gaming sector itself, for trying to nurture different areas, also from an economic point of view.  Does that sort of give you some idea?
Yeah, I think that’s fabulous, it makes me want to move to your country (laughs).  
Well I mean there are different areas, different aspects; we don’t do, or I, personally myself, I, the previous project I was involved in was in game making, so you’ve mentioned like Games Mechanic and Scratch and so forth, and we were doing some research into that and also having the same interests, and I guess the same enthusiasm that you mentioned in terms of learning by doing and experiential learning and computational thinking and creativity, all those areas, so that they’re definitely things that we have in common.  
It’s a little bit frustrating for me, as someone who’s interested in this, not being able to comment and engage with you a little bit more during the interview (laughs), because I’d really like to pursue it further, but these are the limits of this sort of format.  But it was very, very interesting getting your input on that and it’s certainly going to be a very, I think, interesting area, the inputs that you’re going to give to the educational perspective on games.  
Okay.  Well thank you, and if there’s ever anything you want to give me input about now that this piece is done, feel free to email me. 
I certainly will, we’ll certainly keep you posted [anonymised] on all of the developments.  I’ll send you perhaps, as well as – okay, we have a certificate of participation and so forth and we’ll give you some links as well to keep in touch.  
Yeah, I would love that. 
I think that would be good, and we’re always very keen to open up, especially with the States, it’s something that we’re keen to open up avenues with, and communication and exchanges, I think that’s a really good thing. 
That’s wonderful.  Well it’s nice meeting you. 
It’s been great and I’d like to thank you [anonymised], very, very much once again for the time, I appreciate it.  We’re all short of time, and I know what it means to someone in the sort of role that you work in, what it means to vote a slot, this fairly large chunk of morning time to this, and thank you very much for that again.  
Yeah, it was awesome, thanks, nice meeting you.  Have a great day. 
You too, and good luck with your presentation at the conference as well. 
Oh my gosh, thank you.