All posts by Robert O. Duncan

I'm an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Sciences at City University of New York, with joint appointments in Neuroscience and Cognitive Neuroscience. I also have an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at New York University. My research interests include cognitive neuroscience, functional magnetic resonance imaging, glaucoma, neurodegenerative disorders, attention, learning, memory, educational technology, pedagogy, and developing games for education.

CUNY Games Workshop at the 2017 Teach at CUNY Day

On May 8th, 2017, the Teaching and Learning Center will be hosting the second Teach@CUNY Day. This event is scheduled for 9am-4pm on the Concourse Level of the Graduate Center. Teach@CUNY Day is open to the entire CUNY community, but we especially encourage attendance by students at the Graduate Center who are or who will be teaching in Fall 2017.

Teach@CUNY Day 2017 will be opened by CUNY’s Executive Vice Chancellor Vita Rabinowitz, and will feature two keynote addresses in the morning: one by Maura Smale (New York City College of Technology) and Mariana Regalado (Brooklyn College) drawing from their book, Digital Technology as Affordance and Barrier in Higher Education; and a second by Natalia Ortiz, a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Graduate Center’s Urban Education Program.

The morning presentations will be followed by a series of workshops that will explore what it means to teach at CUNY, and that will immerse attendees in a range of pedagogical approaches. It will be a terrific opportunity to join and help further build a community of practitioners who are committed to making CUNY’s classrooms inspiring and transformative spaces. Lunch and coffee will be served.

You can register for Teach@CUNY Day at cuny.is/tcuny. Please plan to join us, and stay tuned for more information about the day!

Teach@CUNY Day 2017

Download Event Flyer

Save the Date: Game-Based Learning Workshop

Can you guess what your lesson on “Finding Citations,” the game “Trivial Pursuit,” and the mechanic “Bluffing” all have in common?

Turning Your Exercises into Games: A Mid-Semester Workshop with What’s Your Game Plan?

Thursday March 23rd, 6:30-8pm
The CUNY Graduate Center
Room 9207

Games and simulations are powerful tools for learning. In this bootcamp brainstorm, BMCC’s Prof. Joe Bisz (English) and Prof. Kathleen Offenholley (Mathematics) break up professors and graduate students into design teams whose job is to enhance an exercise with the mechanics of popular board games. This workshop provides a fun introduction to the engagement and deep learning principles behind game-based learning pedagogy.

For more information.

Download the flyer.

Planning to attend? RSVP here, thanks!

EdSurge News Reports on the CUNY Games Network

The following was published on Ed Surge News. Follow the link at the bottom of this reprint to find the original publication.

By George Lorenzo Sep 13, 2016

When four professors from the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) started collaborating on game-based learning (GBL) in developmental math and writing instruction in the mid-2000s, they had no idea what they were setting in motion. Today, more than 160 GBL researchers and practitioners contribute to the dynamic CUNY Games Network (CGN), housed within the City University of New York (CUNY), with its more than 540,000 students on 24 campuses.

The network links educators across disciplines who are interested in using games and other forms of interactive teaching to improve student success. And participants are showing that gameplay is serious business: data from BMCC classes suggests that when students have fun learning they appear to have more meaningful learning experiences. …

Read the rest of the article on EdSurge