Dr. Gunver B. Majgaard
Associate Professor
Gunver B. Majgaard, PhD, is an Associate Professor of the Game Development and Learning Technologies Unit at the Maersk McKinney-Moeller Institute, University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and she is changing how we learn about emerging technology for the betterment of the lives of young students in Europe.
In additional to a background as an electrical engineer and more than twenty years of teaching experience, Gunver also holds a PhD in Robotics and Learning processes, which focused on design of educational tools and learning processes. This unique expertise has resulted in the creation of the educational program BA/MA in Game Development and Learning Technologies at SDU Metaverse Lab.
As a venerated project manager, Gunver has been involved in several funded international research projects with collaborations across Europe. She has pioneered utilizing virtual environments in health promotion, mental care treatments as well as educational initiatives.
Emerging technologies for a better tomorrow
Gunver has many passions within emerging technologies, but education is the common nominator in almost everything she does. Her research interests are using virtual reality, augmented reality, and robotics for educational and health purposes, and as well as curriculum development and designing digital tools for training and learning processes focusing on game-based learning, participatory design processes and didactical design.
Emerging technologies and computational thinking are a crossdisciplinarity research areas that combines technological and didactical research about digital competencies, problems solving and design processes, as well as computer science education. The idea is to prepare students with 21st century competences. Gunver’s research in emerging technologies and computational thinking has been driven by the idea of developing methods to give young students a better understanding of strengths and weaknesses of emerging technology by programming, experimenting, and reflecting.
Teaching across the Metaverse
Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) have emerged as powerful educational technologies with the potential to transform learning experiences, training, as well as treatment and health promotion. The research focus of Gunver Majgaard is three perspectives on VR/AR as educational tools: 1) learning/training attributes, 2) practical issues and 3) learning design guidelines.
Gunver developed courses for VR/AR and Learning Technology for bachelor engineering students. The idea was to make the students become better programmers by programming for emerging platforms e.g. Oculus, HoloLens and Google Cardboard. Moreover, the idea was to explore the new platforms and develop prototypes for game-based learning. Work that inspired several papers.
We explore the potential benefits and challenges of XR technology and provide practical guidelines to create engaging and effective XR products and prototypes. In both student and research projects we produce extended reality (XR) applications, these perspectives offer valuable insights for students, designers, and researchers interested in leveraging VR/AR for training and learning.
Partnerships and collaborations
Publications
Research Interests
- Design of digital educational tools
- Participatory Design
- Learning processes
- Didactical design
- Program and Curriculum Development
- E-learning
- Emerging technologies
- Physical-digital Interaction
- Design-based Research
Current projects
MYRE
Stands for More Youths Realize Emerging Technologies and is a pilot project started spring 2023 that seeks to obtain knowledge regarding how to prepare both students’ and teachers’ for engaging with the emerging technologies that will shape both the society and job market of the future.
The founders of MYRE are a team of researchers and experts from SDU, Moeve Aps and Svendborg Erhvervsgymnasier. This international-minded project rests on a widespread collaboration effort across both the private and education sector in Denmark, where the ROBO didactic approach is currently being tested within select the Danish public schools and in high schools on Fyn. Furthermore, a partnership has been established with German educational institutes on both high school and university level.
With her more than 20 years of teaching experience, Gunver B. Majgaard is the local technical lead on MYRE, using her expertise in learning processes and design of educational tools within the field of emerging technologies.
Read more about MYRE under projects.
VRaid
What does sweat, and virtual reality have to do with treating social anxiety? VRaid is an ambitious collaboration between clinical and technical researcher that seeks to develop the VR8 solution, an innovative and personalized treatment for social anxiety in adults.
Through VR patients will be exposed to anxiety-inducing situations controlled by their therapist, such as public speaking. In real-time biometric data, such as heart rate, sweat and respiration levels, informs the VR system that then adapts to the individual needs of the patient.
Through artificial intelligence the biometric data is compiled into an ‘anxiety model’. Over time the system creates an anxiety model for each patient, and this knowledge is used by the therapist to estimate how challenging the anxiety-inducing situation should be. For instance, if simulating public speaking should the audience be more attentive to what the patient is saying, or would it be beneficial for the treatment to introduce an indifferent audience?
Gunver B. Majgaard uses her extensive experience as a project manager and background as an electrical engineer to oversee the merging disciplines that attributes to what makes VRaid so ground-breaking: the usages of biofeedback in combination with virtual environments and exposure therapy.
ROBOdidactics
The ROBOdidactics model is used as a shared framework for understanding and learning about technology.
The model supports student-centered teaching where students often will work with technologies themselves. The model provides guidelines to help designing lessons about technology, as well as inspiration for more hands-on education about production in which students learn to create products of technologies.
Furthermore, the ROBOdidactics model can support teachers taking technology education a step further. Environment places technology in relation to the rest of the world, allowing students to reflect on important topics such as the digitalization in society and career prospects. Digital literacy allows the teacher to dwell into the matters of ethics in relation to technology and so assists students in critical thinking when it comes to social media, artificial intelligence and much more.
The model assists teachers in planning, evaluating and redesigning curriculums, as well as in communicating about their teaching. ROBOdidactics was developed as a part of the MYRE (More Youths Realize emerging Technologies) project, which you can read about here.
Teaching
Current supervision Topic
- Emerging technologies in game-based learning
Courses
Læringsteknologi 1 (learning technology) equip students with the theoretical and practical fundamentals to design learning systems and applications, and to understand learning processes.
Læringsteknologi 2 (learning technology) takes creating learning systems and applications to the next level by introducing gamification and other game elements, as well as how to playtest and user test learning processes.
Virtual and Augmented Reality 1 and 2 teaches students how to create VR, AR and mixed reality applications from idea to digital implementation with the intention of developing applications for usages in education, simulation and games.
