Education

Decimal Point: Can Having Fun Increase Learning?

When it comes to learning math, how much fun you are having is rarely factored into the equation. That isn't to say that game designers have not tried to turn instruction into more engaging material. For instance, there are plenty of educational games on the shelves; unfortunately, very few of them have been shown, through empirical research, to lead to improved learning outcomes, particularly in mathematics. Thanks to a team of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), this is changing.

HCII Takes Home Best Paper Award at UMAP 2016

Can past learning activities predict differences in individual student success? A recent project with researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) set out to answer just that, and picked up a Best Paper award along the way.

First authored by postdoctoral fellow Michael Eagle, the paper "Predicating Individual Differences for Learner Modeling in Intelligent Tutors from Previous Learner Activities" was awarded Best Paper during the User Modeling Adaption and Personalization (UMAP 2016) conference.

Ogan on Sensors in the Classroom

Carnegie Mellon University, like other colleges and universities, is able to create smaller learning cohorts from large lectures by using teaching assistants. These TAs often have varied backgrounds and levels of familiarity with the U.S. educational system, which can make learning experience and outcomes differ from section to section.

Faculty Spotlight: Assistant Professor Amy Ogan

Amy Ogan, an assistant professor in the HCII and an educational technologist, is fascinated by researching ways to make learning more engaging, effective and enjoyable. Ogan is also a recent recipient of the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship, a global fellowship program for the research on child and youth development.

BloomBoard Collaborate

Metals Prime, a team of five masters students from Carnegie Mellon University partnered with BloomBoard to envision a product to support educator learning in an online community setting. We embarked on a strongly user-driven end-to-end research, design, and development process which has culminated in the creation of BloomBoard Collaborate, a tool that aids teachers in building and creating transformative professional learning communities (PLCs) in a digital environment.

Transformative Live-Action Role-Playing

Live-action role-playing (larp) combines face-to-face improvisation with game rules to create collaborative, playful narrative experiences for the participants. While many larps are created purely for entertainment, a growing number of larps strive to affect players. These larps include educational larps, larps for mental or physical health, larps for social change, larps that convey political points of view, and larps that ask players to explore ethical or moral quandaries.

Technology-Enabled Role-Playing in Design

College professors frequently use role-playing in class as a way to engage their students and enhance the learning experience. However, role-playing often creates an unbalanced classroom, where the majority of students are observing and only a few actors are “engaged.” This project investigates using technology to engage all students during classroom role-play. In particular, we want to explore social media platforms such as Twitter, which have been shown to enhance classroom engagement.

Scaffolding Science Achievement in a Culturally Diverse Classroom

In this project, we aim to address the systematically-reduced standardized test scores of African American students compared to their Euro-American peers by using virtual peer technology to understand the role of dialect, and more broadly, cultural congruence, on students's performance, and to help students achieve in the classroom.

Playtesting: Education and Practice

Playtesting helps game designers evaluate not whether their games are useful and usable, but whether they are playful and playable. Strong playtest skills are critical to innovation in game design. They are also critical to making students self-directed, independent game designers who can evaluate and critique their own work. Better playtesting education is necessary if we want to help students create better games.

Personal Informatics for Intercultural Competence

Working and living internationally can be a rewarding but difficult experience. This project investigates how people gain intercultural competence while developing technology to support the learning experience. We are currently developing a system to help new international teaching assistants allow for increased and equitable discussion in the recitation sections they lead. For many ITAs, discussion has not been a part of their previous school experience.

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