Scaffolding Understanding through Research on Games for Education (SURGE) at surgeuniverse.com is a collaboration between Vanderbilt University and Arizona State University. SURGE focuses on helping students articulate and connect tacit intuitive understandings about kinematics and Newtonian mechanics into the explicit formalized understandings of the discipline. SURGE integrates research on conceptual change, cognitive processing-based design, and socio-cognitive scripting with design principles and mechanics of popular commercial video games such as Mario Galaxy, Switchball, Orbz, and Portal.
Technology Opening Diverse Opportunities for Science (TODOS) is my core research group at Vanderbilt. Our work focuses on integrating research on learning with research on digital environments (particularly gaming environments) to support diverse student populations studying science. Our work broadly focuses on representations, argumentation, and learning research in digital environments.