Center for Healthy Minds

Constance is currently a professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of California-Irvine. Previously, she was an Associate Professor in Digital Media at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and co-directs the Games+Learning+Society (GLS) Center. She collaborated with the Center on translating interventions for healthy minds to digital media and games, particularly for youth.

Her research is on cognition and learning in commercial entertainment games and games for impact. In 2011-2012, she served as Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) where she advised on national initiatives related to games for impact.

Her current interests include assessment and learning analytics in areas such as collective problem solving, digital and print literacy, informal scientific reasoning and pop cosmopolitanism.

Her work has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation.

In 2009, she helped author, as one of nine committee members, the National Academies of Science report entitled Learning Science: Computer Games, Simulations, and Education and in 2011 she edited the volume Games, Learning, and Society: Learning and Meaning in the Digital Age in the Cambridge University Press series “Learning by Doing.”