21st Century Scholar

After many months of brainstorming, working with students, designing, developing, iterating, creating art and music, researching and oh yes, PLAYING … we are ready to share Collegeology Game’s latest game: FutureBound. You’ve read my posts about Application Crunch and Mission:Admission—two games targeted at high schools students and designed to cultivate college application strategies. This latest [...]

A group of four students sit huddled around a lunchtime table at a Los Angeles high school close to USC. It’s the middle of fourth period. I’m zipping through the quad after just finishing a fast-paced playtest session of the new game we’ve been developing with our collaborators from USC’s Game Innovation Lab. The new [...]

I sometimes say stuff at work where I’m like, “Why did I say that? What did I just do?” I imagine the phone call that I’ll have with my dad later on in the day where he’ll laugh with me and say, “Be careful Kris—don’t mess up your job.” I’m a first-generation academic and while [...]

As many of you know, four years ago, the Pullias Center for Higher Education and Game Innovation Lab embarked on a collaboration intended to significantly improve low-income and first-generation students’ access to college information and support. Using game-based strategies, our educational researchers partnered with game designers to develop Collegeology Games, a suite of games designed [...]

2013 brings a new focus to the Collegeology project: middle school. Mission:Admission, the high school college application game we launched last year, is still generating players—and we are still continuing to research the impact of the game on students’ college-going efficacy—but the design team has been hard at work on our third project, a game [...]

Last week we launched Mission: Admission to a national audience. In the first week, we generated 700 new players. Our team is excited to see how students react to the game. I asked Foshay Tech Academy senior, Abigail Montejo, to share some thoughts on her journey to college and on playing the game. To check [...]

Last week I attended the NACAC (National Association for College Admissions Counselors) annual conference in Denver. It was my first time attending the conference and I loved it—and not just because I woke up to snow one morning and the other morning had the most phenomenal mini-doughnuts at a funky breakfast-all-day joint called Jelly. I [...]

In my last blog post, I shared a major milestone for the Collegeology Games project: we launched the beta version of Mission:Admission—the Facebook game we have been working on for the past three years. My invitation extended still stands—please log on and play. It has been such fun over the last week hearing back from [...]

A few weeks ago, I realized that my house seemed awfully quiet for a post-school afternoon and wondered what my almost 6-year-old son and almost 9-year-old daughter were up to. They knew they had a few things to take care of—such as finding a home for pajamas that had been hastily strewn across the bedroom [...]

In late December, Collegeology Games designers Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard and I traveled to Texas  to conduct a case study at a Houston area high school. Our goal was to playtest the card game (Application Crunch) and soon-to-be launched online game (Mission:Admission) with a group of predominately African American, low-income students. We arrived right before [...]