Blog

Energize is an educational tool for understanding how to plan and implement sustainable energy solutions. It represents the potential that games have for teaching people complex ideas, like environmental realities, by demonstrating the obstacles, considerations, and possibilities involved. AC Atienza, English graduate student, collaborated with the Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI) via a Mitacs partnership and co-op term to turn their prototype and concept of Energize into a fully-realized game.

Energize is an educational tool for understanding how to plan and implement sustainable energy solutions. It represents the potential that games have for teaching people complex ideas, like environmental realities, by demonstrating the obstacles, considerations, and possibilities involved. AC Atienza, English graduate student, collaborated with the Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI) via a Mitacs partnership and co-op term to turn their prototype and concept of Energize into a fully-realized game.

Building interdisciplinary, boundary-breaking environments

Although interdisciplinarity is stressed in academia, there is an evident gap in facilitating this in the corporate and administrative worlds. Much like academia, working environments from multidisciplinary teams with people bringing in perspectives from numerous academic backgrounds and various positions on methodology and knowledge. The GI administrative team is in a unique position where they must work with the academic world along with the internal, University structure, and external industry partners.

The Touchless Elevator Concept was developed by GI member Tanay Singhal, Research Intern for the Haptic Computing Lab, and co-author Mahika Phutane, a PhD student at Cornell doing research in HCI and Accessibility.

Wait… so you’re telling me playing games facilitates interdisciplinary discourse?

This preliminary exposure to games as icebreakers helped form lasting bonds with the other co-op students after only an hour of playing Werewolf. Throughout the term, I watched many other groups bond over play. However, what is “play” and how does it help to 1) sustain the environment; and 2) encourage discourse.

Read the original piece published on Waterloo Stories here.

For the students at the Games Institute (GI), cancelling Waterloo’s termly GI Game Jam was never an option.

We asked Dr. John Harris, valued GI alum from Computer Science and founder of the Playful Pixel, to tell us the story of his collaboration with the Ideas Clinic, a Software Engineering initiative that offers creative crash-courses for first-year students. Dr. Harris stepped in to support the clinic in designing and delivering a game experience. Read on to discover the results of this unique interdisciplinary collaboration and find out what “Games as learning sandbox” means.

An online platform built with the assistance of the The Games Institute at the University of Waterloo has been launched to assist healthcare and social service providers to recognize and respond safely to family violence.

What do we mean when we say “Interdisciplinary”?

“Interdisciplinary” has recently become an ill-defined buzzword across academia and industry. At the Games Institute, we used to shuffle through multiple prefixes including multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary based on what felt right for the project. Throughout my co-op term, we often discussed which term best suited our ethos, mission, and debated how to define our boundary-crossing identity.

New research by Rina R. Wehbe and collaborators from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Games Institute at University of Waterloo explores territoriality in playful applications. In the paper, Wehbe et al. investigates the relationship between digital and physical spaces as they apply players’ understanding of shared space, collaboration, and social behaviours.