Mayor of Minecraft: Koai’e

In a recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, less than 25% of students were proficient in issues related to civics (Litvinov, 2017). Mayor of Minecraft: Koaiʻe is designed for 9th-12th graders to provide an immersive and role-play civic responsibility lesson. The goal of this lesson is to facilitate students’ understanding of difficult, community-wide decisions through role play as key leadership who are tasked with budget and resource allocation in a small village. Four of the SaLamander Project learning categories for virtual worlds are used: demonstration, diagnostic, role-play and constructive (Rishter el al., 2007).

Hawaiians first settled in the Lapakahi area (what is now Lapakahi State Park) during the 1300s, and Koaiʻe was a fishing village that served as the center of population and cultural activity in the Lapakahi ahupua’a until the late 1800s. Because this lesson takes place in Hawaiʻi, the town name was added to increase relevance to our target population.

Shauna Sibonga
Learning Design & Technology
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Shauna is a graduate of the Learning Design & Technology (LTEC) MEd program at UH Mānoa and is a current doctoral student in the program. Her research interests include how participation in online communities affects the persistence and graduation rates of first-generation college and low-income students. She serves as an Academic Advisor for TRIO Student Support Services on the UH Mānoa campus and previously served as a Transfer Specialist, working with incoming Kauaʻi Community College and non-UH students. Prior to her role as an advisor, Shauna worked for the Learning Assistance Center training and coordinating undergraduate tutors, and as an educational technologist for the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. She has worked in higher education for all of her professional career.

Suzanne Brown-McBride
Learning Design & Technology
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Suzanne Brown-McBride has dedicated her life and work to the promotion of public safety, equitable access to justice, and effective government. Suzanne began her work on behalf of sexual assault victims as a community education specialist and crisis line advocate. She went on to manage several victim-service agencies in Washington State and Oregon. Today, Suzanne consults with jurisdictions as well as public and private entities who are committed to effective and just innovations. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in Learning Design and Technology.

Duane Esty
Learning Design & Technology
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Grew up on waters of the Pacific Northwest. Resident of Hawaii Island for several years.

Enjoy the path of guitar scale, experimenting with tone using an electric guitar and modeling amp. Digging on an awesome '63 Fender Jaguar reissue lately.

Undergraduate in Computer Information Systems and English. Spent time writing software documentation at various high-tech companies in the Seattle area. Latest project being at Microsoft for MS Office (XML Paper Specifications and Open Packaging Conventions for RSS protocols).
Interest in and independent research of artificial intelligence, particularly voice AIED and adaptive learning. Asking how learners might benefit from Voice AIED in VR as a means of a multimodal content distribution mechanism. Avid contributor to LinkedIn AI forums including Amazon Science and Microsoft Research.

It is fortuitous for us to be here in this time and space of the learner experience design evolution. There are profound ethical issues that are for us to diffuse and be the keep.

Currently enrolled in UH MEd LTEC program. Started cohort in Fall 2019, where I've had the privilege of working with some talented LTEC classmates on some great projects and proof of concepts like EXiBi (Mobile Technology in Leisure Attractions), Mayor of Minecraft (Gamification of a civic lesson), also NLP in OpenSimulator as a means of a content distribution mechanism for potential pedagogical use (652D Author E-learn Virtual Reality).

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