Join us Friday, November 21, at 12 pm, ET, for our virtual Brown Bag session: “To Game or Not to Game: The Advantages and Disadvantages of Educational Gaming Applications and Interactive Learning Platforms in Live and Online Classes.” This session focuses on an examination of applications and platforms that promote gamification of instructional and communicational methods in in-person and virtual classrooms. By relying on a set of concrete examples from Materia, Quizlet, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Mentimeter, this Brown Bag meeting enables the participants to expand their pedagogical toolkits. At the same time, it sheds light on the ways in which a more mindful employment of such tools can help overcome the obstacles they often create in cultivating students’ attention spans, critical listening abilities, and creative thinking. ============================================================================= Mehrenegar Rostami is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Area of Musicology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA in 2023. Her research engages with the dynamics of human mobility, socio-economic developments, and politico-cultural identity formations in inter-and multicultural environments. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork research on international music festivals in Austria, Canada, Germany, Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and the United States and her publications have appeared in various Ethno/Musicological journals in the U.S. and elsewhere.