As head of education at SLATE, I have responsibility for courses offered by us inside the university, as well as to industry and the public through after education. I am also the project leader for the development of the center’s Interdisciplinary Master in Artificial Intelligence and Learning Sciences, for which we look forward to receiving candidates in the autumn of 2026. 

In my research, I focus on collaborative design frameworks and visual languages to empower stakeholder participation in learning game creation. More concretely, I work using a co-design framework called eLuna. eLuna enables stakeholder participation while guiding the game- and narratological design towards characteristics that empiric research has shown to induce positive effects on engagement, motivation, and learning outcomes. My main research focus is that of evolving eLuna itself. I am also interested in effects evaluations from eLuna (and other) games, and in other ways of using the framework, for example in using the method to generate mutual understanding and situational awareness in interdisciplinary groups.

Prior to and alongside my academic career I have 20 years of industry experience, serving as designer and producer of more than 60 game-based learning systems. Most of these, about half, have been for and with science center and -museums, either concerning development of game-integration in original exhibits, or making game-based learning trails tying concepts together to reach higher curricular learning goals during school program visits. Another large portion, about a third, has been developed for use in education, either as direct learning games and simulations for pupils and students, or as research candidates for use in scientific interventions. The remainder is a wide range of projects, inside culture and art mediation, news and entertainment media, organizational information and edutainment campaigns, and public and private industry initiatives using games to inform demographics about various topics and concepts. 

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Palmquist, A., Gunnars, F., Morten, N., Gkini, C., Breien, F., & Jedel, I. (2021). Gamified learninganalytics: An initial outline of design concept synergies from two fields. Proceedings of the Nordic Learning Analytics (Summer) Institute (NLASI 2021). https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2985/

Breien, F., & Rødseth, I. (2006). Usability factors of 3D criminal archive in an augmented reality environment. In Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles (NordiCHI '06). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 385–388. https://doi.org/10.1145/1182475.1182518