Krystina Madej showed some of the physically engaging games students have created in her Play and Digital Games class during the GVU Brown Bag Series presentation in which she introduced her new book "Physical Play and Children's Digital Games."

Watch her presentation : http://gvu.gatech.edu/event/brown-bag-archive/gvu-center-brown-bag-seminar-series-krystina-madej

Over the past four years she's helped students to understand how play engages children cognitively, emotionally, and physically and to use this information to create digital games that have children take their play outside of the screen and into their physical space. In the talk she presented an overview of play and toys as these have been viewed over two millennia, the behavioral psychology and neuroscience that supports physical play as a crucial aspect of development, and the trajectory of digital games in contemporary culture. The games she featured included Kelly the Chameleon, an iPad game in which Kelly can reflect a color a child can find in the space around them, the little green Alien that a child can program to have human attributes like being ticklish, and Cam, another Chameleon, who is a soft toy that changes color through sensors embedded in the plushie and the companion picture book.