My name is Nell O'Rourke and I am a third year Ph.D. student at the University of Washington advised by Zoran Popović. I work in the Center for Game Science developing technologies to foster learning and engagement in educational video games. I am particularly interested in understanding how game interfaces can adapt to a player's strengths and weaknesses and empower learning and exploration. I am also a member of DUB, a multidisciplinary group at UW that conducts research in Human Computer Interaction and Design.

Email:

eorourke [at] cs [dot] washington [dot] edu

Mail:

Computer Science and Engineering
Box 352350
Seattle, WA 98195-2350

Office:

Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering, room 386

CV:

PDF available here

Learning Mindsets
In this work, we are collaborating with psychologist Carol S. Dweck to apply her theories about learning mindsets to educational games. Dweck's research has identified two distinct mindsets: a fixed mindset in which people believe that intelligence is an innate quality that cannot be changed, and a growth mindset in which people believe that intelligence can be acquired through hard work. Her work has shown that mindsets can be changed, and that promoting the growth mindset leads to improved student performance. We are working to incorporate growth-minded feedback into our games and study the impact of this feedback on in-game outcomes and external performance metrics.

Targeted Hinting Systems
One important challenge in the design of educational games is to create opportunities to teach players new concepts. I aim to address this challenge by developing a hinting system that provides tips and lessons that are directly targeted to the misunderstandings of an individual player. I am exploring a variety of hint types to develop a system that will engage and empower players to learn and tackle new problems.

Game Tutorials
One of the key challenges of video game design is teaching new users how to play. While many games use tutorials to introduce new players to game mechanics, very little is known about how tutorials affect engagement and retention. We are examining a number of different tutorial designs across multiple games to try to discover more about the relationship between tutorials and player behavior.

2013

Liu, Y., Mandel, T., Butler, E., Andersen, E., O'Rourke, E., Brunskill, E., Popović, Z. Predicting Player Moves in an Educational Game: A Hybrid Approach. The Sixth International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2013). PDF

2013

O'Rourke, E., Butler, E., Liu, Y., Ballwebber, C., Popović, Z. The Effects of Age on Player Behavior in Educational Games. Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2013). PDF

2012

Andersen, E., O'Rourke, E., Liu, Y., Snider, R., Lowdermilk, J., Truong, D., Cooper, S., Popović, Z. The Impact of Tutorials on Games of Varying Complexity. Proc. SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012). PDF

2010

Chaudhri, R., O'Rourke, E., McGuire, S., Borriello, G., Anderson, R. FoneAstra: Enabling Remote Monitoring of Vaccine Cold-Chains Using Commodity Mobile Phones. ACM Symposium on Computing for Development (DEV 2010). PDF

2010

Anderson, R., Blantz, E., Lubinski, D., O'Rourke, E., Summer, M., and Yousoufian, K. SmartConnect: Last mile data connectivity for rural health clinics. 4th ACM Workshop on Networked Systems for Developing Regions (NSDR 2010). PDF

2007

Interrante V., O'Rourke E., Gray L., Anderson L. and Ries B. A Quantitative Assessment of the Impact on Spatial Understanding of Exploring a Complex Immersive Virtual Environment using Augmented Real Walking versus Flying. Proc. of the 13th Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments. PDF

2007

Interrante, V., Anderson, L., Ries, B., O'Rourke, E., and Gray, L. Experimental investigations into the feasibility of using augmented walking to facilitate the intuitive exploration of large scale immersive virtual environments [Abstract]. Proc. of the 4th Symposium on Applied Perception in Graphics and Visualization (APGV 2007). vol. 253. ACM, New York, NY, p.144. PDF

2007

Interrante, V., Ries, B., O'Rourke, E., Gray, L., Lindquist, J., and Anderson, L. Evaluating alternative metaphors for augmented locomotion through large-scale immersive virtual environments [Abstract]. Journal of Vision, 7(9):145, 145a.