Nancy N. Blackburn Email & Phone Number

Syracuse, Ut, Us

Salt Lake City, Ut, Us

EAE 6330 Game Engineering III (Fall 2022, Spring 2022, Spring 2024) - Instructor of Record for advanced master's students. - Overhauled curriculum to be an effective and consistent gameplay programmer course on software patterns and game design practices. - 100% of student feedback said the course and the instructor were effective.EAE 4900/6900 Psychology of Games (Spring 2024, 2023 [first year 6900 offered], 2021) - Instructor of record for 30-60 senior undergraduates and master's students. - Co-creator of this brand new special topics course. - Designed online instructional layout, course materials, and curriculum. - Oversaw TA’s tasks, ensuring new course content and assignments were created and graded in a timely and efficient manner.EAE Independent Study (Spring 2023) - Mentored senior undergraduate through an HCI user research project.Youth Education Program/EAE Sponsored: Game Design and Programming (Summer 2020) - Instructor of Record - Designed and taught five iterations of the course as Instructor of Record, for youth ages 7-14EAE 6320 Game Engineering II (Fall 2021) - Teaching Assistantship (TA) - Mentored students with coding questions (C++)EAE 6330 Game Engineering III (Fall 2020) - Teaching Assistantship (TA) - Mentored students with coding questions (Unity/C#) - Guest Lecture: Formal Game Design Frameworks, Nov 24, 2020

My research intersects human-centered computing (HCC) with meaningful play, cybersecurity, privacy, and design. Published work includes serious game design theory, an AI co-creativity application, preference learning for procedural content generation, and presentations at national conferences on mathematical biology computational models. I've worked in the game's industry in entertainment & educational games. My aim is to enhance the benefits of play for all types of games & their communities.

- Help working moms recover from burn out and escape toxic living so that they can enjoy life and motherhood without the mom guilt. - Over 15 years of experience in proven natural solutions/remedies to reduce toxins and improve well-being without the woo-woo.

Dissertation Research- Exploring state-of-the-art game and cognition design to inform a new design theory to reliably achieve learning objective outcomes to make education and psychotherapy more accessible through meaningful play.Engineer Lead/Student Research Project Lead, Project CODE Switch- Designing, implementing, and human research testing Project CODE Switch: An awareness/learning serious game helping people realize their implicit biases and providing mitigation strategies to use in real-life situations.- Directed team of four engineers on the game that is to be web-deployed with SSO (single sign-on) utilizing GameMaker 2, GML, and git.

North Salt Lake, Utah, Us

Application developer. Acted autonomously on improving various development projects. Communicated all development milestones and projects in DevOps workflow via Gitlab, and as necessary and/or helpful to tech support and end-users. Resolved all escalated tickets in a timely and professional manner.Trained QA personnel and Database Administrator on in-house software with SQL, git, C#, and other programming languages.Backend web developer over web projects: improvements, updates, and fixes for franchise/store reports, complex franchise, store, and personnel directory, CMS and plugin maintenance and updates, marketing requests, trending reports, and overall web development. E.g. Automated survey results report: resulted in a 50% increase in the number of surveys taken by vendors.Database Developer. E.g. Initiated and implemented a normalized database from multiple scattered databases and tables (sometimes data in more than ten different places now in one place): improved data accuracy, significantly decreased administration time, saved money, and minimized code bugs in all software packages across the entire development team. Also cleaned up database users and restricted access to maximum for their needs but minimum access.C#, Python, Git, Gitlab, SQL, JSON, XML

Salt Lake City, Utah, Us

Gameplay mechanics, player movement/interactions, 2D animations, activity scoring, user interface, user experience, gameplay designDeveloped 2D and 3D interactive software and mini-games as part of a small team for use in pre-kindergarten curriculum for iPad and web using Unity. Gave useful gameplay mechanic and design feedback to development director and lead engineer: nearly all suggestions made were implemented.Unity/C#, Git

North Salt Lake, Utah, Us

Backend web development. Developed store and franchise reports, and made various improvements to BaseCampCentral.com as requested.

Redwood City, Ca, Us

Integral part of the incredibly creative and talented concept team working in the preproduction cycle. Active participant in brainstorms, directional meetings, design and engineering decisions. Team valued my ideas and trusted and supported my decisions. Performed code reviews for three other interns. All team members were generalists and helped each other with scripting, coding, art, research, etc.Worked on multiple simulation-based prototypes that included work cycles of one day to two months, vertical slices, game overviews, technical experiments, game mechanic exploration, weekly to daily playtests, single-player, network multiplayer, paper prototypes, and target platforms of PC, console, tablet, and mobile.Two games worked on were approved for development, and another was being considered as a metagame to a game that was in current production.Development director extended length of internship.Unity/C#, C++, Perforce

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Us

Pioneered the impact and integration of game engines into simulations at Rockwell through prototyping an underwater serious game scenario.CryEngine 3/C++, Lua, Git

Adept at the creative process of addressing all necessary details to make a creative work a fully immersive experience for the end user. Create, write, edit, and develop for various creative mediums but especially games!Won several writing competitions. Edited and ghostwrote on four books.Who’s Who for Women in Business 2011.

North Salt Lake, Utah, Us

Project manager of BaseCamp Central site. Co-created its design and user interface functionality. Reduced site hosting costs by 66%, improved efficiency, and delivered four months ahead of schedule by re-scoping project. Developed IMAP, Vendor Email, Vendor Survey reports, and Tech Billing App. Consulted on various projects, improved efficiency, saved company money, and increased team morale.C#, SQL, Git

Columbus, Ohio, Us

Adroit customer service skills and understanding of the end user resulted in 200% increase in customer satisfaction, multiple nationwide sales awards, and 20% reduction in employee turnover.Promoted four times. From Sales Associate to Bra Specialist, Sales Lead, then Backroom Supervisor to Product Manager then finished as Customer Experience Manager.

Tutored, mentored, and encouraged a great number of students in a wide variety of math and computer science classes and on national exams to high grades and passing scores, even when they had multiple previous failures. Inspired them to be and do more. Examples: One student had failed college algebra three times and I tutored her to a B and her bachelor's degree. Another student had taken the math praxis three times always with the same score which was three points shy of being able to teach in the state that she wanted. I got her ten extra points and she's happily teaching where she wanted to. A math major had failed 5000 level probability twice but I tutored him to a B+ and graduation. A high school boy was failing math, but he went on to take AP Calculus. A college business student barely passing business algebra went on to all three calculus classes because I made math exciting to her. I've helped several students with ADD/ADHD overcome their focus difficulties, pass their math classes, have more belief in themselves and improve their grade in other classes -- even ones I wasn't tutoring them in. One such ADD student had always received GPA's below 3.0 -- the lowest below 2.0. He ended up getting above a 3.5 consistently the rest of his school career, even after I stopped tutoring him. He is now getting his Bachelor's in Computer Science.Subjects (not inclusive): Algebra, Business Algebra, College Algebra/Pre-calculus, Calculus, Differential Equations, Probability (introduction and higher level courses), Basic Group Theory, Math Clep, Math Praxis, programming C++/C#.

Worked on various mathematical research projects. 1) Modeled the fibrin architecture of blood clots using a system of linearized coupled ODEs in Matlab. 2) Programmed numerical methods in Matlab to solve inverse equations of linearized coupled ODEs. 3) Collaborated with a team of three mathematicians and two biologists to create and analyze a tri-trophic parasitoid-host mathematical model from observing our live colonies; helped design new experimental methods. 4) Developed a mathematical theory for the augmentation of endangered mammals based on existing fishery and mammal population growth models; used Matlab to model the expected population growth.Research Presentations:1) National Conference for Women in Mathematics, 2005 and 20062) Specially invited to present research at the University of Utah Math Department’s Annual Awards Ceremony, 20063) Undergraduate Colloquium for the University of Utah Math Department, 20054) Intermountain Junior Science & Humanities Symposium, 2002

Developed a genetic algorithm interface for multiple sequence alignment for the CHPC computer cluster. Presented bioinformatical findings at the National Conference for Undergraduates.

Monthly University wide magazine publication. Worked on the editorial staff team in designing themes and planning articles for each issue. Published in all but one issue.Content edited feature and opinion articles. Copy edited every article before each issue went to press. Often helped design team catch visual errors.

Published in every single issue of bimonthly newspaper. Worked with individual reporters to improve stories. Copy edited every issue. Won 1st place in sports writing and honorable mention in feature writing in the UofU Journalism Competition

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Human Computer Interaction, Game Design And Cognition

Master Of Entertainment Arts And Engineering, Engineering Track

B.S., Mathematics