Kurt D. Squire

Reflecting on pandemic-era teaching, this article argues that educators should move beyond emergency remote instruction toward participatory, interest-driven, and community-connected learning with technology. Drawing on cases across K–16, Squire describes pragmatic design shifts—student creation, networks of support, and cross‑context experiences—that can make learning more resilient and equitable post‑COVID.

Synthesizes interviews and cases from the serious‑games sector to argue that interactive digital media promotes problem solving, identity exploration, and situated practice. Presents design considerations for aligning information, tools, challenge, and aesthetics to create effective e‑learning experiences.

The paper proposes the augmented reality educational gaming (AREG) approach for handhelds and narrates a rapid‑prototyping design program culminating in Environmental Detectives. Across multiple iterations and school deployments, the authors articulate design principles (e.g., dynamic events, differentiated roles) and authoring‑tool needs to enable teachers and students to build their own local AR scenarios.

This design experiment introduces augmented reality (AR) simulation games on mobile devices as a means to engage learners in environmental science. Four case studies show how positioning students as field scientists surfaces beliefs about scientific practice, connects classroom content to lived spaces, and supports sense‑making through narrative structure and contextualized inquiry.

Through three classroom cases (~28 students), this study examines a place‑based AR curriculum designed to foster environmental science argumentation. Gameplay required students to collect and interpret data, role‑play, and craft evidence‑based explanations. Findings indicate AR games can scaffold authentic inquiry and support the development of robust scientific arguments.

Argues that video games should be understood as designed experiences that situate problem‑solving, identity, and participation in rich contexts. The article outlines implications for curriculum, assessment, and research—moving beyond decontextualized content delivery toward designing learning environments that leverage systems thinking, narrative, and embodied interaction.

Introduces and problematizes design‑based research in the learning sciences, articulating assumptions (e.g., cognition as distributed and context‑bound), methodological commitments, and the dual aim of developing theory alongside designed artifacts. Provides a foundational agenda for DBR as a bridge between research and real‑world educational problems.

Highlights and problematizes challenges in carrying out design‑based research (DBR). Situated within the interdisciplinary learning sciences, the paper contrasts DBR with laboratory experimentation and characterizes DBR in terms of designed artifacts and resultant theory. It argues that learning, cognition, knowing, and context are co‑constituted, and that DBR serves as a bridge between theory and practice to generate robust, actionable knowledge about learning.

Introduces critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process that couples participatory design with local transformation while producing a reusable instructional design. Reflecting on the Quest Atlantis project, the authors discuss opportunities and tensions encountered as they built local critiques and reified them into designed artifacts subsequently implemented worldwide.

Case study of Civilization III used in an urban school. Analyses show that engagement involved both appropriation and resistance, learning emerged through cycles of failure and strategy revision, and students developed richer understandings of relationships among history, geography, economics, and politics.

Situates public and scholarly debates about games within broader cultural reactions to new media. Surveys research and practice relevant to learning with games, and argues for analyses that consider gameplay as socially situated practice with implications for the design of next‑generation educational media.