Keynote LATIMPE Platform 2020
We are very happy to present Evert Hoogendoorn as keynote speaker of the conference. Hoogendoorn is a game designer as well as an educator at the University of the Arts in Utrecht.
Designing education in a technological age (and keeping it human)
Recent developments have forced us all into a situation where technology is one of the few solutions still left for us to reach our students. Under the pressure of the corona crisis, higher education has taken a digital developmental leap that nobody held possible for the next 20 years.
At the same time, it has become clear what we miss when we are not physically present with our students. Technology and education is not a question of translating our classes to a different medium. It is a question of re-inventing our didactics, our goals and the way we communicate.
This becomes obvious now that we are forced into this new reality, but the questions that are now surfacing have been there for some time.
Under influence of real world developments like games, social media, artificial intelligence among other things, the way we look at the world around us has changed. Our relation with knowledge has changed, our sense of distance, space and time has changed. We, and even more so our students, live in a different world then we did 50, 20, or even 10 years ago. This also means that our behavior has changed. In education this is often perceived as problematic with students having shorter attention spans than earlier and a need for immediate satisfaction.
But the developments have also brought many interesting possibilities and challenges to the table. Based on principles borrowed from the domain of game design, Hoogendoorn and his colleagues have developed a way of designing education that focuses on learning behavior instead of the content that we have to offer. They call it “ludodidactics”, a combination of (the Latin word for) play and education.
In his talk, Evert Hoogendoorn will take you through some of the most elementary principles, and show some results. Hopefully, this keynote can inspire you and give you some insights to take with you on the journey into the digital world ahead of us.
Biography
Evert Hoogendoorn is both an educator, a strategist and a game designer. He has been part of the game industry for over 20 years and was co-founder of the first game design program in Europe at the University of the Arts Utrecht.
He has a background in education and theatre and still continues to work on the development of innovative educational solutions at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (HKU). There, he is program leader for “ludodidactics” at the HKU College. Hooogendoorn and his colleagues uses game design principles to create innovative educational tools and learning experiences.
As a designer and strategist he works at the Dutch interactive media company IJsfontein, where he aims to make games that are not only entertaining, but have a positive and proven impact on people’s lives. Evert Hoogendoorn is mostly focused on the domains of medical care, – cure, mental health and education. Still, he has also worked for museums, NGO’s and corporates. In several of these projects, he has worked closely with researchers from different universities and medical centers, often within academic constraints.
To effectively incorporate academic rigor with game development, he is not only designing the games itself, but also the co-design strategies to better align the process of validation with the creative- and production strategies of games.