IGEC.

Katie Salen is a designer, educator, and gamer interested in the aesthetics of interactivity and the transformative potential of play. She is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California at Irvine, as well as Chief Designer and co-founder of Connected Camps, an online learning platform powered by youth Minecraft experts. Katie is the founding Executive Director of Institute of Play, a member of both the Connected Learning Research Network and the Connected Learning Lab. Much of her work for the past 10 years has focused on meeting kids where they are at in order to design engaging, hands-on experiences that have the potential to transform youth futures. Katie's current work has a strong emphasis on the design of sustainable and equitable online communities, and she is on a mission to help make the internet more kid-friendly. Katie has been involved in the design of slow games, online games, mobile games, and big games in both the commercial and independent games sectors, and once co-designed a karaoke ice cream truck driven by a squirrel.