Dr. Jen Jenson is the course creator (with Prof. Suzanne de Castell) and is Professor of Digital Languages, Literacies, and Cultures in the Department of Languages and Literacies in the Faculty of Education at UBC. Prior to moving to BC, she worked at York University in Toronto, where she was the Director of the Institute for Research on Digital Learning. Jenson has published on gender and technology, technology policies and policy practices in K-12 schooling, online education, video games and learning, and gender and digital games. She is the Lead researcher on a 2.5 million dollar grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, “Re-Figuring Innovation in Games“.

Dr. Keri Ewart is a lecturer in the Masters of Educational Technology at the Faculty of Education at UBC, and will be running a Makerspace summer institute in 2022.  Dr. Ewart also co-leads (with Dr. Samia Khan) the Anti-racism speaker series initiative for the MET department. Prior to recently joining the MET team, Dr. Keri Ewart was the Director of Curriculum Development and Programming and Training for the Asian Business and Management Program at York University, where she developed and executed specialized training programs in the education, government, and corporate sectors. She also taught teacher candidates at Brock University for seven years in subjects including 21st-century literacy, technological literacies, social studies, assessment, and mathematics. She was also a K-12 teacher, ELL and special education resource teacher, and board-appointed modern learning resource teacher for the Peel Board of Education for 17 years. Dr. Ewart’s work and research detail the effective integration of technology into classrooms to promote literacy and numeracy skills using multiliteracies, multimodalities, and game-based learning theories to drive instruction and has supported faculties of education, boards of education, and schools around the world.

Dr. Samuel McCready is a recent graduate from the Communication and Culture program at York University. His dissertation work, “Playing and Making History: How Game Design and Gameplay Afford Opportunities for a Critical Engagement with the Past,” presented findings from two participant-based research projects and argued that playing and making historical games offers learners an opportunity to engage critically with history as a subject, and can pose questions related to the epistemological, interpretative, and ideological components of historical scholarship. His dissertation/current research is located in game studies, game-based learning, productive pedagogies, and history education.