A great deal of contemporary research argues that humans learn from experience. This research, however, rarely explicates what constitutes an experience for humans, let alone experiences that lead to deep learning for human flourishing. Experience is constituted of inner and out sensations processed in certain ways. Thus, a biologically realistic theory of learning must be based on a theory of sensation and how sense making derives from sensation. This dissertation seeks such a theory in the emerging literature on what kinds of creatures humans are and what this implies about how they learn and flourish. This literature ranges across several different disciplines, including neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and work on how affect guides cognition and action. Humans are as able to learn from experiences they have had in media as they are from experiences they have had in the real world. In either case, however, humans do not learn deeply from random experiences. They learn best from experiences that have been designed to recruit affect, help them manage their attention, and give them ways to assess the success of actions they take toward goals. Thus, teaching in the sense of experience design—a task for teachers in schools, as well as media designers and artists of all different sorts—is fundamental to human learning and flourishing. The dissertation defines flourishing in terms of the state of a human being’s allostatic load, a variable which can be measured. Since I am interested how experience designers design sensation to create sense making and sense making that can enhance human flourishing, I am interest in experience design in the arts, a domain that has traditionally been seen as an important source of insight built on sensation. I use examples from traditional and contemporary art in the dissertation. The last chapter is an extended study of the anime Attack on Titan I show how the design of Attack on Titan uses sensation to engender deep contemplation and discussion of complex political, historical, and philosophical issues. The way it achieves this goal has important implications for teaching and learning in and out of school.

This dissertation takes up the topic of simulations in social studies education. Though simulations are taken up widely by social studies educators, and though they are described as best practice in social studies standards documents and teacher evaluation rubrics, the term lacks specificity. Additionally, design, research, and implementation efforts associated with social studies simulations often lack theoretical grounding and clarity. A major consequence of this lack of conceptual and theoretical clarity is curriculum violence perpetrated upon young people, particularly along racial and socioeconomic lines, as the result of poorly conceived simulations.This dissertation is presented as three standalone manuscripts, bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion. In the Introduction, I present an overview of the social studies simulation literature. In Chapter Two, I propose mechanics analysis, a methodological approach to systematically analyzing social studies simulations and games. In Chapter Three, I report on an empirical study using mechanics analysis to analyze three digital social studies-themed simulation games: Offworld Trading Company, Frostpunk, and Surviving Mars. In Chapter Four, I build on the previous two chapters to coordinate the salient research and theory across three field—history and social studies education, learning sciences, and games scholarship—to propose a design theory for a particular kind of simulation game: disciplinarily integrated, consequentially engaging simulation games, or DICES. Finally, I conclude with Chapter Five, in which I highlight what I view as the implications of this work as a whole, including for teachers, teacher educators, researchers, and designers.

The growth of electronic sports (esports) is undeniable. One dimension of esports’ growth can be seen in its adoption as an extracurricular club activity across an increasing number of high schools in the United States. Researchers and educators in literacy have increasingly recognized and emphasized the study of students’ everyday lives and interests, calling for responsiveness to the ways students actually experience literacies versus how they are traditionally taught. In this respect, the popularity of esports in high schools positions it as an activity in the everyday lives of an increasing number of students. As such, this dissertation project explored the topic of esports in high schools through a lens of multiliteracies and digital-age literacies. This work addresses an important knowledge gap because students are converging to reveal an ecosystem where they are drawing from and building on their everyday literacies in non-trivial ways. And although there is a growing body of multidisciplinary scholarly work on esports, relatively little work has explored esports in high schools. Therefore, I asked the overarching question: How are digital-age multiliteracies taking place in high school esports contexts? Specifically, I focused on the digital-age literacy practices, demands, and perspectives in high school esports. Guided by research questions on these three topics, I carried out a study of two high school esports clubs for 22 weeks. This study was guided by qualitative, interpretive, naturalistic, ethnographic, and case study research designs. My findings describe six assertions: (1) literacy practices were used to engage with each other in communal and competitive ways; (2) the social functions of esports’ literacy practices take precedence over scholastic goals; (3) literacy demands of esports emphasize unambiguous and timely multimodal communication for managing teams and scheduling events; (4) literacy demands of high school esports focus on multidimensional fluencies between what is on and what is around the screens; (5) participants characterize the engagement with esports as positively contributing to “belonging”, of a “safe space”, and of opportunities for “critical thinking”; and (6) participants characterize their engagement with high school esports as positively contributing to future occupational or educational preparedness and health.

Among researchers, educators, and other stakeholders in literacy education, there has been a growing emphasis on developing literacy pedagogies that are more responsive to the ways young people experience literacy in their everyday lives, which often make use of digital media and other technologies for exchanging meaning. This dissertation project sought to explore the nature of these digital-age literacies in the context of children learning through and about new technologies. Conducting a year-long, multimethod observational study of an out-of-school library-based program designed to engage students in self-directed learning around the domain of computer programming, this project was framed around an analysis of digital-age literacies in design, discourse, and practice. To address each of these areas, the project developed a methodology grounded in interpretive, naturalistic, and participant-observation methodologies in collaboration with a local library Code Club in a metropolitan area of the Southwestern U.S between September 2016 and December 2017. Participants in the project included a total of 47 students aged 8-14, 3 librarians, and 3 parents. Data sources for the project included (1) artifactual data, such as the designed interfaces of the online platforms students regularly engaged with, (2) observational data such as protocol-based field notes taken during and after each Code Club meeting, and (3) interview data, collected during qualitative interviews with students, parents, and library facilitators outside the program. These data sources were analyzed through a multi-method interpretive framework, including the multimodal analysis of digital artifacts, qualitative coding, and discourse analysis. The findings of the project illustrate the multidimensional nature of digital-age literacy experiences as they are rendered “on the screen” at the content level, “behind the screen” at the procedural level, and “beyond the screen” at the contextual level. The project contributes to the literature on literacy education by taking an multi-method, interdisciplinary approach to expand analytical perspectives on digital media and literacy in a digital age, while also providing an empirical account of this approach in a community-embedded context of implementation.

As interest in making and STEM learning through making and tinkering continue to rise, understanding the nature, process, and benefits of learning STEM through making have become important topics for research. In addition to understanding the basics of learning through making and tinkering, we need to understand these activities, examine their potential benefits, and find out ways to facilitate such learning experiences for all learners with resources that are readily available. This dissertation is a study of children’s learning while tinkering inspired by the Educational Maker Movement. It is motivated by the projects that children playfully create with broken toys, art and craft resources, and other found objects, and the connections of such activities to learning. Adopting a sociocultural lens this dissertation examines eight to twelve-year-olds’ learning while tinkering in collaboration with friends and family, as well as on their own.

Using a case study methodology and studying interactions and transactions between children, materials, tools, and designs this study involves children learning while tinkering over a week-long workshop as well as over the summer in the Southwest. The three hallmarks of this study are, first, an emphasis on sociocultural nature of the development of tinkering projects; second, an emphasis on meaning making while tinkering with materials, tools, and design, and problem-solving; and third, an examination of the continuation of tinkering using newly acquired tools and skills beyond the duration of the workshop. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the ongoing discussion of children’s playful tinkering, how and why it counts as learning, and STEM learning associated with tinkering. Implications for future learning and the ways in which tinkering connects to children’s everyday fabric of activities are considered.

This dissertation shares the results of a study of the community of the mobile augmented reality game Pokémon Go. It also serves to build on and expand the framework of Distributed Teaching and Learning (DTALS), which here is used as a framework through which to explore the game’s community (Gee & Gee, 2016; Holmes, Tran, & Gee, 2017).  DTALS serves to expand on other models which examine learning in out-of-school contexts, and in particular on the connections between classroom and out-of-school learning, which numerous scholars argue is of critical importance (Sefton-Green, 2004; Vadeboncoeur, Kady-Rachid, & Moghtader, 2014). This framework serves to build bridges as well as fill gaps in some key literature on learning in out-of-school contexts, including connected learning (Ito et al., 2009), participatory culture (Jenkins, Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009), learning ecologies (Barron, 2006), and affinity spaces (Gee, 2004; Gee & Hayes, 2012). The model also focuses on teaching in addition to learning in and across informal contexts.

While DTALS can be used to examine any number of phenomena, this dissertation focuses on the community around Pokémon Go. The game, with its emphasis on geography and community, presents unique opportunities for research. This research draws on existing video game research which focuses on not only games but their communities, and in particular the learning and literacy activities which occur in these communities (Gee & Hayes, 2012; Hayes & Duncan, 2012; Squire, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006).

The results here are presented as three separate manuscripts. Chapter Two takes a broad view of a local community of players, and discusses different player types and how they teach and learn around the game. Chapter Three focuses on families who play the game together, and in particular three focal parents who share their perceptions of the game's merits, especially its potential to promote family bonding and learning. Chapter Four discusses teaching, in particular guides written about the game and the ways in which they are situated in particular Discourses (Gee, 2014). Finally, Chapter Five offers implications from these three chapters, including implications for designers and researchers as well as calls for future research.