The iSchool's new senior lecturer, Joel Ross, encourages students to take on a 'playful', or questioning attitude when learning to solve problems. He says this approach allows them to learn how to learn. Ross applies this philosophy to his own work studying gamification and use of digital and non-digital games for purposes other than entertainment.

“I’m excited to be joining the iSchool and for the opportunity to teach within a creative, interdisciplinary environment—one in which students and faculty are focused on developing new ways that technology can be used to improve the world and people’s lives,” says Ross.

Ross will join the iSchool as a senior lecturer in July from the University of Puget Sound where he currently teaches computer science. He holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Information and Computer Science from the Informatics department at the University of California Irvine, and a B.A. in Mathematics and English from Colorado College.

He will teach technical courses on mobile and pervasive systems, and will be developing programming courses tailored to iSchool students. He hopes to help students learn to implement new interactive experiences at the boundary of the physical and the virtual.

In addition to his interest in developing games that encourage a ‘playful’ approach to programming, Ross has an ongoing interest in crowdsourcing and other distributed work systems, and exploring the relationships between work and play in digital systems. He cites the research of iSchool faculty Amy Ko and Jin Ha Lee as examples of what drew him to the School.