About Yuqi Wang

Hi everyone.

 

Imagine that you can take students on a field trip to the bottom of the ocean to study sharks, or to the center of a galaxy to see the effects of a supermassive black hole. You can also take the students on an immersive journey to Beijing, New York and Sydney to learn their culture in one single day.

 

This is my version of future learning. My name is Yuqi Wang. I aim to provide data-driven immersive learning environments and educational games solutions to improve student motivation and provide personalized learning experiences. With educational games, students can build a molecule, sculpt a piece of art or relive important historical events. 

 

You may wonder what triggered my passion for educational games? I actually have a very interdisciplinary background, spanning civil engineering, architecture, tertiary education management, cognitive science and game design. Today, I am going to share my Journey Story and present to you all how my dots connected and led me here to where I am now.

 

A game changed my life. It is called Angry Birds. I attended a girls’ high school in Sydney where very few students have an interest in engineering. However, I taught myself structural analysis via playing the game Angry Birds and I found it fascinating and meaningful. Hence, I chose to study civil engineering and architecture for my bachelor's degree. I was personally convinced that games can be used to fulfil non-game purposes – such as increasing motivation, attention, and developing non-cognitive skills.

 

During my 5 years of work experience in the Higher Education sector and my first master's in tertiary education management, I observed that a great portion of students was very passive in learning. I saw the demand and opportunities of providing motivational mechanisms to promote students’ self-regulated learning. This is where incentive systems, visual aesthetics, game mechanics, narrative and musical scores can come in to make learning playful. When the learning and game mechanics are tightly linked, students would be intrinsically motivated to play, experience and learn.

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In the past years, I have completed several research projects with Professors from the University of Cambridge and New York University and found that positive emotions could stimulate stronger motivation for learning, whereas negative emotions may disturb learning. learners' emotional state and emotional design of a learning program can have an impact on affective and cognitive processes hence influencing learning. Therefore, learners' emotional state is an important factor that should be taken into account when designing learning activities. Teachers and instructional designers should provide adequate learning environments that promote positive emotions. Well, this is what game mechanics are so good at - that is to manipulate learners’ emotional states. I am looking forward to integrating learning mechanics and assessment mechanics with games mechanics to make learning more adaptive, personalized, and, hopefully, more effective.

 

Now with the interdisciplinary courses offered by Penn GSE Ed Entrep Program, I am able to pivot my ideas and build a unique perspective on education technology and venture management before launching my projects on the market. 

 

So, let's now go back to where my journey began: I learned engineering via playing the game Angry Birds and found it playful, educational and meaningful. I hope one day, some students will play my games and proudly say “Learning is fun, and I know what to study for my degree and life”.