Elisabeth Gee

Guiding Research Questions:

• How can we support families in the creation of home media ecologies that support learning and positive family relationships?
• How can game play and game design be combined with mentoring and social support to promote desired learning outcomes?
• What is the significance of gender and culture in learning across digitally mediated environments?

Current Research Projects:

Dr. Gee is co-PI on the NSF-funded "Play in the Making" project, that aims to develop an empirically-based teaching and learning model for broadening participation of girls, minority, and low-income middle school students in STEM and Making in schools and libraries. Her team is collaborating with middle school teachers and librarians to create and test a series of design challenges that engage middle school students in addressing personally and socially significant real world problems through game making  in Maker spaces. Their research objectives include developing a better understanding of the development of design thinking through game design and how mentors can play a role in promoting Making and design thinking.

As PI, Gee is currently in the final year of an NSF funded project that involved the creation and testing of educational games intended to promote middle school age girls' understanding of core computer science concepts. Her team is collecting comparative data on the outcomes of three versions of the games, to gain a better understanding of the role of story in enhancing girls' engagement and learning. They also are using a project as a focal point for re-conceptualizing the process of designing educational games in the context of competing interests and constraints.

An ongoing project is analyzing data and communicating the findings of a study of Mexican-American families that Gee conducted with Dr. Sinem Siyahhan in 2014 as part of a larger collaboration with a network of researchers led by the Joan Cooney Ganz Center, the research arm of Sesame Street and a national leader in research on children’s media use. They gathered data for this study through home visits and structured interviews with 16 families. Dr. Siyahhan and Gee have a wealth of data that they are jointly analyzing and alternating leadership for co-authoring papers. Currently Gee is working on an analysis of the role of siblings in shaping the home learning ecology around digital media.