Hi there! I'm Olivia Schmidt.
Alum, MS Learning Design and Technology @ USF 🌴.
I'm a recent graduate from the University of South Florida, where I completed my master's in Learning Design & Technology with a concentration in Game-Based Learning Analytics. While I hail from sunny shores, I recently relocated to the 'la belle province' of Quebec, and am in the process of developing my French (and simultaneously, my polar hardiness.) My interests lie in the video game industry, though I've shifted my personal and professional direction into the game-based learning market. Watching students' excitement using technology at USF's STEM INQ lab, connecting and weaving narrative branches alongside students in Twine, and using Minecraft: Education Edition in the classroom to introduce coding concepts has been deeply gratifying. I've come to realize that ensuring students' motivation, playfulness, and creativity when using these digital tools means everything to me.
Projects
Physics "Vignettes"
During my graduate research assistantship under David Rosengrant, physics educator and dean at the College of Education, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, I assisted in developing several game-based, alternative assessments called "vignettes". . . .
CyberScouts Application
Born from Gamelab, a collaborative program that brings outside subject matter experts from several industries, students in FIEA’s advanced degree program worked diligently to develop an educational app that would teach basic cybersecurity concepts to . . .
WiCyS 2023 Lightning Talk
People begin playing games in early childhood and continue playing them throughout their lives. These games, whether digital or analog, engage individuals physically and/or mentally at home or elsewhere. . . .
FSAE & USF Esports
My involvement in this project stemmed from a recently developed interest in cars; I had began exploring avenues to apply my newfound occupation, and along the way I discovered that we have a Formula Society of Automotive Engineers (FSAE) club at USF . . .
USF Esports Summer Camp
The USF Esports Summer Camp spawned as a brainchild from upper-level directors in the Vinik Sport & Entertainment Management program at USF. Originally slated to include a fixed age range (12~16), children as young as 8 were signed up for the camp . . .
Map of Online Communities
When the World Wide Web became available to the general population in the 90s, outside of walled gardens like AOL and CompuServe, the cyberspace landscape started filling up with odd and geeky webcomics displayed on clunky HTML formats. In 2006, webcomic artist Randall Munroe began his origin story . . . (image download)
Writings
Participation in Cyberspace: Tracing Earlier Online Communities and their Vernacular Practices
A community, as we understand it in the sense of the physical environment, is bound by place; it is a lived experience, entwined with complex environmental and social necessities, and involves all of our senses . . .
Video Games: The Apotheosis of Art, Entertainment, Procedural Rhetoric
Video games are an expressive medium, meaning that they represent real-world situations and systems. Players are conditioned to interact with those systems and are thereby invited to form an opinion and cast judgments about them . . .
The Heartbeat of the Internet: Online Communities
The Internet is the never-ending rhythm of our collective consciousness expanding onto itself; all of our individual thoughts, ideas, morals, and beliefs are unified into one common consciousness network. The visible connectedness of the web passes through memes, trends, and calculations . . .
The Digital Landscape of Game Environments; Ecocriticism
In video game studio Naughty Dog's video game The Last of Us, players witness the aftermath of a global pandemic (no, not that one). Without human maintenance, nature in all of its variegated and luxuriated forms has reclaimed buildings . . .
Literacy and Games: An English Major's Perspective
The traditional division of literature is no longer the paradigm of communication. Where English studies were once understood as a discipline responsible for inculcating through printed books and historical texts, 21st-century advances have demanded the inclusion . . .
How Game Economies Mirror Real Economies
The parallels between games and real-world systems have always been an area of fascination for gamers. Within a society, virtual or otherwise, an economy will inevitably form if there is a productive output and a means to trade . . .
Photos
