First of all I want to thank all people who made this experience possible!

Thank you very much!

Conference

The variety of the topics and the presented content blow my mind. It’s amazing which topics you can merge to create something very interesting and useful.

For example there was the climbing wall from Finland, where they used projectors on the climbing wall for interaction to create a gameful approach for exercising. Since I want to create a game to detect children with dyslexia this is a very inspiring work!

Mentoring

Meeting Katherine Ibster opened my eyes for gaps in my PhD-Topic and what I should focus on while attending the conference. After meeting her I started to ask lots of people about my study which I will do when I get back to my university. She encourage me to talk to people about my topic to get “reviewed” even before submitting anything. Therefore I decided to pitch my future study to experienced researcher and it was an amazing input and discussion! I will do this in the future and I call it: Study Crowdsourcing Method

Networking

While I was pitching my ideas sometimes to random strangers who became interesting discussion partners, I also looked out for the researcher on my field or fields I want to know about. This are people I had a longer discussion with so I took their names.

Sebastian Deterding (Gamification)

Ioanna Iacovides (Backdowns in Games)

Anna Blandford (Measuring Studies)

Susanne Boll, OFFIS Oldenburg (Interaction for kids)

Nicolai Marquardt (UCL)

Rodrigo de Oliveira (Google)

Ali Jahanian (CSAIL MIT)

Keynote

The keynote from Salman Khan was inspiring and heart breaking. I feel like I want to do something like that and just need time to figure out how to reach the goal:

My Goal: Detecting Children with Dyslexia early and with no-cost so that we can provide them with the help so that they have an impact on themself and on society. Generally be successful in live and happy!

I didn’t know about the academy, so attending the conference gave me some dreams to reach out to.

Culture and Researchers from the Future

Going on a conference that is not even near the town you grow up in, helps to see the similarities and differences in the cultures and people. I cannot tell how many different people I met and from which countries – they came from. Here just some examples: Indian, America, Spain, Canada, Brasilien, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, China, Japanese, Philippines, France, Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Great Britain, …

This will be probably the researchers I will meet the next years and I am looking forward to meet them again.