Professor Effie Law
An estimated 2.2 billion people play video games worldwide. This includes 81% of 11 to 14 year olds in the UK.
Professor Effie Law, Professor in Human-Computer Interaction is pioneering exciting, interesting and informative ways to use video games in education.
Games are known to be powerful motivators. Effie’s research focuses on usability and user experience methodologies to make interactive systems that are easy and enjoyable to use, but fundamentally enhance the learning experience.
Her work on defining user experience (UX) established Effie as a forerunner in her field and has been cited nearly 1,000 times by her peers (Google Scholar, March 2019) in various Human-Computer Interaction areas.
Effie has contributed to the design of a digital educational game (DEG), 80 Days, which teaches geography knowledge to children aged 12 to 14 years old. She has also contributed to DEGs for children on the topics of food nutrition, basic numeracy and geometric shapes.
It’s not just children who can use games as a learning tool.
University students can learn JAVA programming via one of Effie’s games. And now, she aims to develop serious games with immersive technologies for training nurses, surgeons and physicians how to do their tasks.
A trailblazer, Effie was the first female Professor to be appointed to Computing at Leicester.
Games are very powerful, effective and fun to work with. They can give instant feedback, which is often very appealing to students.
Key milestones
2017 Professor in Human-Computer Interaction, Department of Informatics, University of Leicester
2016-2021 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Distinguished Speaker
2012-2017 Reader, Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester
2009-2013 Chair of the COST Action TwinTide on User Experience Research
2009-2012 Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester
2005-2009 Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester
2005-2009 Chair of the COST Action MAUSE on Usability Research
2001-2004 Senior Research Scientist, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
1997-1999 Post-doc Research Associate, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), Germany
1997 PhD degree in Cognitive Psychology, LMU, Germany, summa cum laude