The TLC Lab is very happy to announce that, on August 20th, 2026, Chu Xu successfully defended her PhD dissertation, “Supporting Teachers’ Adoption of Digital Games for Learning: Developing and Validating the Curriculum Guide.”

Chu joined the TLC Lab in 2017, bringing with her a strong background in psychology from Beijing Normal University and an interest in understanding how digital games can be used to support learning. Over the years, I have watched that interest develop into a research program focused on one of the central challenges facing game-based learning: we know that games can provide rich learning experiences, but getting them meaningfully into classrooms requires more than simply giving teachers access to a game.

This question ultimately became the focus of Chu’s doctoral work. Rather than asking only whether students can learn from games, Chu focused on the teachers who must decide whether, when, and how to use them. Her work examined the barriers educators face when adopting complex digital games and, importantly, what we can do to help overcome those barriers.

This led to one of the largest and most exciting projects Chu undertook during her time in the TLC Lab. Beginning in 2021, Chu and fellow TLC Lab member Robin Sharma worked directly with Ubisoft’s Discovery Tour development and web teams to create curriculum guides for Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Viking Age. The goal was ambitious: take the extraordinarily rich historical worlds created for the Assassin’s Creed series and make them easier for teachers to integrate meaningfully into their classrooms.

Chu helped turn that idea into a practical resource for educators. The resulting interactive guides connected curriculum objectives with activities inside the games, provided adaptable lesson plans for different ages, subjects, and instructional approaches, and addressed the technical and practical barriers teachers encounter when introducing games into their classrooms. Rather than simply telling teachers that games can be educational, the guides showed them how they could actually use them.

What I particularly appreciate about Chu’s work is that she did not stop once the guides were created. She approached their development as both a design problem and a research problem. Her dissertation systematically examined whether curriculum resources like these can change teachers’ knowledge, confidence, and willingness to adopt digital games for learning. In doing so, her research moved beyond advocating for game-based learning to generating evidence about the supports teachers actually need to implement it.

The impact of this work has extended well beyond her dissertation. Chu has presented the Discovery Tour research at international conferences, contributed to two books examining the educational use of Assassin’s Creed and its Discovery Tour games, and contributed to research published in Teaching and Teacher Education examining how teachers’ experiences with digital curriculum resources influence their self-efficacy and acceptance of educational games. The curriculum guides themselves were developed as freely accessible resources that could be used by educators around the world.

Chu’s contributions to the TLC Lab also extend much further back than Discovery Tour. She contributed to our early work examining the educational quality of mathematics apps and the evidence surrounding tablets as tools for mathematics learning. Across these projects, there has been a consistent theme in her work: educational technologies have enormous potential, but realizing that potential requires understanding how they are designed, how people actually use them, and what supports are necessary to translate that potential into effective educational practice.

Her accomplishments have also been recognized through several competitive awards, including a China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship, the Clifford C. F. Wong Fellowship, and a Doctoral Research Scholarship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC). These awards reflect both the quality of her scholarship and the promise of her research. They also supported an ambitious program of work that took a complex idea from initial research questions, through a major industry collaboration, the design of real educational resources, empirical validation, and ultimately a completed doctoral dissertation.

On a personal level, it has been incredibly rewarding to watch Chu develop as a researcher over nearly a decade. She joined the lab with an interest in psychology, games, and learning and leaves her PhD having made a concrete contribution to how we think about bringing those games into real classrooms. Along the way, she navigated an ambitious industry partnership, worked across disciplinary boundaries, collaborated with researchers and practitioners, and helped create resources that teachers can actually use.

Chu’s work is a reminder that the challenge in educational technology is rarely just creating better technology. Often, the equally important challenge is creating the bridge between an innovative technology and the educators and learners who might benefit from it. Her dissertation makes an important contribution to understanding how we can build that bridge for digital game-based learning.

It has been a pleasure to supervise Chu and to watch her grow from a new doctoral student into an accomplished learning scientist and expert in digital game-based learning. I am extremely proud of what she has accomplished and look forward to seeing where she takes this work next.