Kevin Valliere

  • Higher education expert with 10+ years experience
  • Passion for teaching and technology
  • Master’s student @ NYU Games for Learning
  • Amateur birdwatcher and aquarist

Email: vallierekevin(at)gmail(dot)com
City: Brooklyn, NY

You Are Standing in an Article About Interactive Fiction

For the Fall 2024 semester “Wireframe” newsletter at NYU ECT, I created two versions of an article about the modern state of interactive fiction and its applications in educational technology: one as a plaintext version, and the other as a playable Twine game.

Text Version
Playable Version

RoboGenesis Design Document

Alongside my classmates Rena Wei and Jinrong Yang, I collaboratively designed a proposal for an educational game aimed at teaching middle school students problem solving skills and the basics of robotics. (For Dr. Jan Plass’s Fall 2024 Designing Games and Simulations for Learning course. Posted with permission of co-authors.)

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Gravity: A Case Study

As part of Dr. Jan Plass’s Fall 2024 Designing Games and Simulations for Learning course, I outlined a simulation to teach the concept of gravity slingshots to high school science students through a browser-based simulation.

Because my expertise does not lie in science or in UX design, I had to focus on some key factors in designing this project:

1) Academic Research. Drawing from topics such as inquiry-based learning and constructivist-based scaffolding, I utilized appropriate and up-to-date research to guide my decision-making.

2) Contextualization. From a small anecdote at the start to the creation of fictional learner personas, I grounded the creation of this simulation by bringing in real life scenarios. This applied both to the underlying framework as well as to the actual content.

3) Market Research. Since I had limited knowledge of this space, I took time to assess state educational standards and similar products which already existed to make sure that my simulation was within the realm of possibility, reasonably novel, and educationally appropriate.

While not all of my future work may be in the form of a game/simulation, these skills are still inherently valuable to myriad kinds of work in higher education research and policy-making.

Presentations & Publications

During my time as an academic adviser, I’ve had the chance to create and present many original works focused on:

Choe, E. & Valliere, K. (2020). Mental health on the front lines: Navigating advising relationships as non-clinicians. NACADA 2020 Conference (Virtual).
Valliere, K. (2019). Bright brains: Advising students with ADHD [Poster session]. NACADA 2019 Conference, Louisville, KY, United States. 

Game Development

Along with my academic work, I’ve spent a few years creating interactive fiction and classic text adventure/parser games under a pseudonym. You can find my collected works on itch.io.

I’m a self-taught coder and developed these games in the Twine and Adventuron engines. I also created all of the pixel art. Here are a few selected favorites:

– PROSPER.0. A creative exercise in destructive poetry. Approx. 30 mins.

– The Familiar. A fantasy text adventure where you take on the role of a crow familiar who must save her caretaker. Approx. 90 mins.

– Reclamation. A sci-fi text adventure where you must investigate a deserted corporate spaceship. Approx. 45 mins.