Welcoming Teanna Feng to the Division of Games
The Division of Games at the University of Utah is thrilled to announce the appointment of Tianying (Teanna) Feng as Assistant Professor. Teanna comes to the Division from UCLA, where she is completing her doctoral work in Education — Social Research Methodology, with an additional master’s in Statistics. Her research sits at a fascinating intersection: using games not just as entertainment, but as powerful instruments for measuring how people learn.
Teanna’s work challenges a fundamental limitation in educational research — the tendency to analyze gameplay data and learning outcomes in isolation. Through her scholarship at UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST), she has developed rigorous psychometric methods that integrate evidence from multiple sources simultaneously, giving educators and researchers a far richer picture of what students know and how they engage.
Her research has explored how fine-grained “process data” — the moment-to-moment clicks, choices, and behaviors players exhibit within a game — can be transformed into meaningful indicators of learning and cognition. This work is not merely theoretical: Teanna has applied these methods to real educational games designed to teach K–12 students core STEM concepts, in partnership with organizations including PBS KIDS.
Teanna will defend her PhD in the coming months, joining the Division as a scholar whose expertise in psychometrics, measurement, and statistical computing positions the Division of Games to deepen its commitment to evidence-based game design and the science of learning through play.
“What drew me to the Division of Games is how it brings together professionals with diverse backgrounds around a shared commitment to games and games research,” says Teanna. “I believe games hold great potential for measurement, and that fine-grained data from gameplay allows us to probe how people think, decide, and learn as they play. I look forward to sharing this vision with students and partnering with professionals across the field to broaden what games can do.”
Fernando Rodriguez, the Division’s Director of Undergraduate Studies and the faculty member who led the search process, reflected on what makes Teanna’s work so compelling: “Teanna’s research gets at something the games field has needed for a long time — genuinely rigorous methods for understanding what players are actually learning and why. Her ability to extract meaning from gameplay data and connect it to real learning outcomes is exactly the kind of scholarship that advances both the science and the practice of game design. The Division of Games is incredibly fortunate to have someone of her caliber joining our faculty.”
Teanna’s hire is part of Press Play, the Division of Games’ major initiative to grow its research enterprise, now completing its second year. She joins four other tenure-line faculty hired through Press Play over the past two years, and the Division of Games expects to continue this momentum — with plans to bring more than ten new faculty to the Division over the next three years.