Tech Tonic expo set for April 11

Western Today staff

April 8, 2013

Kimberly Voll, a faculty member at Vancouver, B.C.’s Centre for Digital Media, will discuss the confluence of Gaming and Higher Education at 2 p.m. on Thursday, April 11, in the Viking Union Multipurpose Room as part of Western’s annual Tech Tonic technology expo.

The event is free and open to the public.

Voll has earned a doctorate in Computer Science and an honours degree in Cognitive Science. She spent six years as a faculty member at the University of British Columbia, and has taught everything from software engineering to video-game development to health informatics.

Her areas of specialization include artificial intelligence and language modeling, user experience, game design, software engineering, and innovative educational methods and curriculum design. Passionate about video games since the age of two, Voll runs the Vancouver chapter of the Global Game Jam (one of the largest chapters in the world), helps coordinate FullIndie (a meetup for Vancouver independent game developers), and is a huge supporter of the Vancouver video-game community and beyond. Whenever possible, she does volunteer consulting for new startups or small companies, including crowdsourced funding strategies and design/development strategies for games and apps.

The Centre for Digital Media is a joint master's degree program of Simon Fraser University, the University of British Columbia, and the British Columbia Institute of Art and Design.

Voll will be speaking at Western as part of its annual Tech Tonic technology expo; this year’s theme for Tech Tonic is “Life in the Cloud: Anything, Anytime, Anywhere.” The expo also takes place in the VU multipurpose room from 10 a.m.-3 p.m. and will have hands-on demonstrations of software, hardware, and how-to mini-clinics on subjects such as streaming, video in the classroom, blogging, social media, conferencing and mobile tools.

For more information about Kimberly Voll’s presentation or Tech Tonic, contact John Thompson at Western’s Office of Communications and Marketing at (360) 650-3350.