Diane Watson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science supervised by Mark Hancock at the University of Waterloo and Regan Mandryk at the University of Saskatchewan. Her focus is on gamification, in particular, how positive behaviours can be encouraged through games. She has been involved in the design of several games, including Reading Garden, an educational game that encourages students to participate in self-study activities such as reading the text book; and Vortex Mountain, an educational exergame that combines in-classroom learning with short bursts of exercise. She is heavily involved in the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo.
Diane did her master's at the University of Saskatchewan in the Interaction Lab. Her thesis work looked at how we could predict the music that people choose to listen to based on their listening context (e.g., who they are with, what they are doing, and what they are feeling).