News

Jonathan Baltrusaitis, English PhD student and Instructor at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, has been awarded the Lea Vogel-Nimmo English Graduate Professionalization Award from the Department of English Language and Literature. This award is given to a graduate student on the basis of academic excellence and merit of professionalization activities. 

Toben Racicot, English PhD student and GI Podcast co-host, has been awarded the TA Award for Excellence in Teaching from the Department of English Language and Literature. "Toben's work in English 109 and English 294 was exemplary.  Student assessment and feedback was excellent, especially in the areas of TA engagement and communication," notes the Adjudicator. 

The HCI Games Group at the GI collaborated with researchers from the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology to provide a visual storytelling experience that explores and explains how nanotechnology is used in our everyday lives, including an explanation of the covid vaccine.

Click to Play!

The project combines digital visual storytelling and game technology. Read more about it here.

Dr. Daniel Harley, GI faculty member and Assistant Professor at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, co-authored “Playing by Ear: Designing for the Physical in a Sound-Based Virtual Reality Narrative” with Aneesh P. Tarun, Bonnie J. Stinson, Tudor Tibu, and Ali Mazalek.

Dr. Peyman Azad Khaneghah, Occupational Therapist and postdocrotal fellow at UW, created a health app rating system entitled Alberta Rating Index for Apps (ARIA) to help people sort through the 300,000+ health apps on the market. In an article by Agewell, Canada's technology and aging network, Dr. Khaneghah explains the intention and design driving the rating system project. 

GI faculty member Dr. Muhammad Umair Shah from the Department of Management Sciences is a co-author on the recently published paper in IEEE Access, “The Role of Personality Factors Influencing Consumer Video Game Engagement in Young Adults: A Study on Generic Games” with authors Amir Zaib Abbasi, Umair Rehman, Helmut Hlavacs, Ding Hooi Ting, and Saima Nisar.

Updates from the First Person Scholar Editorial Staff:

It’s March, and that means spring is almost here! Though, for us in Ontario, it also means we’ll be experiencing “second winter” before summer mysteriously appears. And with a new season comes a new FPS update! We’re very excited to announce and highlight our newest and our upcoming projects geared towards expanding the Games Studies community into other spaces and/or conversations.

Dr. Elizabeth Caravella, GI member and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at York University, authored a chapter in the new edited collection “The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom”.

Pallavi Sodhi, Research Intern for the Council for Responsible Innovation and Technology (CRIT) and Dr. Jason Lajoie, Research Associate for CRIT, gave a guest lecture about inclusive board game design for students at Branksome Hall in Toronto. Read a summary of the presentation on our blog.