What GEE! stands for
The GEE! award recognizes excellence in educational game design. The award is judged by international leaders in the field.
We’re inspired by the scholarship of Dr. James Paul Gee and are grateful he’s lent us his name in our quest to shine a spotlight on excellent games from around the globe.
Meet the Davids, the Co-Chairs
David Gagnon
David is the Director & Founder of Field Day. He's also a researcher at WCER, programmer, game designer, and passionate advocate for using games to understand and transform how kids learn. David is the co-founder of the PLAY MAKE LEARN conference and the Games and Learning Summit. He serves as a PI on several research projects that explore the following topics in video games: educational data mining, co-design, mixed reality (VR, AR), and location-based games.
David created ARIS, an open-source game design platform that has supported the development of thousands of location-based AR projects and hundreds of educational papers. David’s work supports other research, from the Open Game Data project, which shares our game data with educational researchers, to Field Day’s teacher fellowship program, which serves as a site to study teachers' professional growth.
David has been the producer or lead designer for over a dozen award-winning games in topics ranging from engineering, science, and mathematics to history and music. He has been an invited guest or keynote speaker for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the MacArthur Foundation, the Pearson Foundation, Serious Play, and several smaller workshops and conferences.
David McHugh
David is a founding member of both Play Make Learn and the GEE! Awards. As teaching faculty at the UW-Madison Information School, David instructs future librarians and other information professionals in technology, design, and games courses. In the past, he held a variety of education, IT, and leadership roles at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, including representing the department across the state as their first Games & Learning Liaison.
Partners
Play Make Learn
The Play Make Learn Conference is a place for collaboration and discovery in the design, research and practice of playful learning, games for learning and positive social impact, making and makerspaces, STEAM education, and arts in education. PML creates an inspirational space for preK-12 educators, designers, developers, innovators, librarians, museum professionals, makers, and researchers to tinker together, share knowledge, and celebrate one another’s work.
UW-Madison Information School
The Information School at UW-Madison is focused on education and research that expands society's understanding of the role of information in all aspects of science, nature and humanity. We educate students and pursue work that adds to the collective knowledge, productivity and innovation, and to the well-being of people, communities, and society.
