Erica Kleinman

Research Vision

As new technology becomes more common in learning and workplaces, it becomes more important to understand how they affect people’s ability to learn, perform, and regulate their development. Games, and esports in particular, offer an unusually rich setting for the examination of these topics as they are fast-paced, high-stakes, uncertain environments where people must continuously construct and adapt knowledge in a self-directed manner while surrounded by a mature ecosystem of tools they adopt on their own terms.

My research sits at the intersection of game-based learning, computational support tools, and human-centered design, with the goal of scaffolding the development of metacognitive, self-regulatory, and other 21st-century skills. Grounded in self-regulated learning theory, I study how players set goals, monitor their progress, and reflect on their performance. I also study how user-facing interventions shape that process, including process visualizations, learner models, and AI agents. I have done this work in contexts ranging from educational puzzle games to esports to virtual reality escape rooms. Through this work I surface insights into how tools and scaffolding influence the learning cycle of players, improve reflection and strategic adaptation, and how the existing practices of high-expertise users and facilitators can and should inform the design of new technology. Alongside these questions of effectiveness I study adoption, observing the opportunities and challenges inherent in introducing new technology into the established practices of expert users.

I study these spaces using human-centered, constructivist methods. This work contributes knowledge about how digital and intelligent scaffolds affect human learning and performance, and how that knowledge can transfer to similarly complex, high-stakes domains. It also yields practical guidelines for designing games and learning supports people will actually use, and illuminates opportunities to leverage games towards novel, impactful use cases.