Building Self-Awareness Through Immersive Digital Experiences

Becky Keene is Director of Content & Professional Learning for insight2execution, and Director of Amazing Things for a new game-based learning company, Phygital Labs. She is responsible for coordinating and supporting training engagements worldwide as well as managing content development projects for customers looking to build high-quality PD for teachers. Becky has 15 years' experience as a public educator, NBCT, professional developer, and change agent. She has supported, trained, coached, and advocated for teachers around the world.

With twenty years of experience in using technology for curriculum learning and soft-skills development, I create bespoke learning resources using new, emerging and accessible technology, such as Minecraft, 3DPrinting, Virtual Reality, Micro:bits and more to support pedagogy and assessment. My core passion is in the transformation of education, through exploration and play. Much of my work focuses on subjects that lie outside the explicit curriculum. Subjects that develop humanity and empathy in learners including gender equality, human rights, the refugee crisis, religious tolerance, food security, environmental science and more.

Melissa teaches Entrepreneurship at a STEM grounded, experiential learning school. Students design, build and test prototypes and then go back into the engineering design process to redesign; along the way they use best practices for sustainable making. Projects include: Arduino based sustainable cities, student built controllers for Minecraft and game based learning projects. She is a doctoral student at Northeastern University and her problem of practice is assessing outreach programs for high school students mentoring younger students in Computer Science. She has delivered adult training to other teachers in the US, focusing on technology including Minecraft and Microsoft tools.