Climate Change

Climate change is an existential threat for our society. We need to change the way society deals with our carbon footprint and pollution. We need to change the way we use resources. We need to act now. This is not something we can tinker at the edges and feel good about, we need to stop borrowing from our children and start respecting the limited resource that we all share.

My research projects include:

• Mobile apps for Carbon Footprint reduction (Honors Project)
• Apps and gamification for visualising engergy use (Honors Project)
• Games for understanding energy (Globle Island, Norway)

Mental Health

Mental and cognitive health has been an important area of interest for most of my life. My father is an Educational Psychologist and my mother taught special needs classes and was a social worker. My PhD was in Computer Science on the functional purpose of REM sleep (PDF ). Much of my resent research has looked at the use of games in cognitive and mental health including:

• The Digital Mental Health Group at Victoria University of Wellington
• Games to help reduce teenage depression
• Setting up Games for Health Norway
• Games for Mild Cognitive Impairment: SmartKuber
• Games for Autism
• Games for ADHD

Education

I have taught at universities and polytechnics for over 20 years in both New Zealand and Norway. One of my area of research is how to improve education. I believe in teaching people to ask questions. The quality of an educaiton is not measured by how much you know, but on how fast you can learn. Thus we need to change education to focus on adaptability and learning, rather than memorisation and compliance.

My research activites include:

• Agilification of Education: using agile methodologies to improve university education
• Games as motivation in education
• Using role playing in group dynamics

Covid 19

2020 saw a massive change in society. As part of addressing social challenges, like many others, I have been spending time trying to use my skills to help.

My activites include:

• Setting up an group within Victoria University of Wellington to look at technology and Covid19
• Changing my mental health projects to look at the effects of isolation
• Analysing mobile apps for Contact Tracing