Current Work
Anatomy Pro-Am
I am collaborating with a group of medical physicists, radiologists, and radiation oncologists to create a Facebook game that both teaches about anatomy, biomedical imaging, and cancer treatment and that crowdsources players’ activity to help clinicians to more effectively treat patients. Learn more about Anatomy Pro-Am…
Trails Forward
In collaboration with a group of environmental scientists and economists, I am creating a role playing simulation about the effects of land use on rural ecologies and economies. Learn more about Trails Forward...
Past Projects
Please contact me if you’d like to learn more about any of the projects below.
Annomonocle
My PhD thesis research focused on the redesign of a school’s tools and practices to help teachers to work together to better understand and respond to students’ thinking. In addition to co-designing new team-based practices for teachers to learn from one another’s classroom experiences, I created a set of data visualization tools, Annomonocle, that allowed teachers to easily explore data about their students’ reading comprehension. These tools gave teachers unprecedented insights into their students’ thinking and supported the teacher team in dramatically improving student reading scores.
This project is described in more detail in a paper that Peter Wardrip and I wrote for CSCL 2011.
SPACE
I was the lead designer and developer of the SPACE curriculum planning and assessment tool, used throughout the award-winning and Presidentially recognized Digital Youth Network and YouMedia educational programs. SPACE is designed to allow communities of teachers to collaboratively author curricula, to learn from one anothers’ classroom experiences, and to assess the impact of instruction by tying evidence of student learning to instructional materials. SPACE is now marketed as part of the Remix Learning platform. In addition, I taught Digital Youth Network’s middle school game programming class for two years.
UPrep
I led the University of Pittsburgh Center for Urban Education’s (CUE) research and development efforts around technology and learning, helping to launch Pittsburgh Milliones University Prep 6-12 (UPrep), a new urban public high school created in partnership by CUE and the Pittsburgh Public Schools. To support that work, I received (with Louis Gomez and Alan Lesgold) a $500k grant from the Heinz Endowments to create a 1:1 laptop program for the school. In addition , I co-led extensive teacher professional development for school faculty, working with them to redesign their teaching to take better advantage of technology.
NetLogo
NetLogo is an extremely popular agent-based modeling environment, used worldwide by scientists and students to learn about science and economics. While a student and research assistant in the Center for Connected Learning and Computer Based Modeling at Northwestern University, I developed several extensions to NetLogo, including a peer-to-peer networking stack that allowed simulated agents to communicate across NetLogo instances, supporting larger and more interactive multi-user simulations.
ActiveCampus
The ActiveCampus project at UC San Diego pioneered location-aware social mobile computing applications, creating tools that help users to find friends, nearby activities and places of interest, and to share their explorations with one another. I was a core member of the ActiveCampus design and research team.