Karenne Sylvester

Background

About Karenne Sylvester

I fell in love with learning-through-playing over 25 years ago, riding the ferries back and forth between Hong Kong and Lamma island, as I drew and cut up pictures to make activities that would enable my students to communicate more effectively in the English language. In 2012, I committed to the digital development of educational activities after one of my Saudi students, a 65 year old Pre-Beginner with no prior experience of the Roman Alphabet, successfully matched lower case to capital letters in a rainbow. His face lit up when the tablet chimed to signal his correct answers, albeit through an app that was more appropriate for his grandchildren. When a young, dyslexic girl, sat in front of a treasure chest on screen, doing her best to match the right verbs to gap fills in sentences (to earn non-existent jewels) reaching for the play button over and over again until she had successfully matched 30 out of 30 questions, I was as hooked as she was, and chose my future career, and I am now an educational technologist. The Greek word for school, “skhole,” once meant leisure, and its Latin equivalent, “ludus” for primary school, is also defined as a game or sport. Plato argued (circa 380BC), that “the central aim of pedagogy is to encourage learning as a form of play.” So, despite the question of whether or not games teach “one thing is clear - games are here to stay [and] it would be good to understand them better.” (Rigby and Ryan, 2011:4) I believe that they do educate, which is why I focus my studies, my explorations and also how I design eLearning materials: looking for what is educational, engaging and game-like.* 2013 MA in Educational Technology & TESOL (*Distinction), University of Manchester * 2017 Professional Diploma in Game Design and Development (*Distinction), Futureworks Media School -Rigby, S. and Ryan, R.M (2011). Glued to games: how video games draw us in and hold us spellbound. CA, USA: Praeger.