Biography
Dan Norton is a founding partner and Creative Director at Filament Games. He specializes in crafting educational game design documents and storyboards that originate from learning objectives. He is proud to have designed games about a uniquely broad range of topics, ranging from marine turtle ecology to legal argumentation. His games have won multiple awards, including the National STEM Video Game Challenge Developer Prize and the 2010 CODiE for Best Educational Game or Simulation. His work has also garnered recognition and/or awards from organizations as diverse as the ACLU, Tech & Learning, The Washington Post and ecstatic children on message boards. He is a founding member of the GLS organization at UW Madison. He is a member of the advisory board of UW Whitewater's Media Arts & Game Development Program, as well as Herzing University of Madison's Game Design Program. He has presented at numerous conferences, including G4C, GLS, and UW Madison's Educational Technology "Brown Bag" discussion sessions. Over the last five years, Dan has developed over twenty games specifically structured around imparting learning objectives through play, and he loves almost all of them. Collectively, Dan's games have been played over a million times. Dan sees Filament as an opportunity to merge his life long love of games with his incessant quest to learn about new and interesting things. Aside from games and game design, he enjoys bicycling, baking, killing dragons with his wife and spending time with his incredibly stupid cats.