This Friday, June 8th, from 2:30-3:30pm, the students from “Beyond Bits and Atoms: Designing Technologies for Creative Learning" will be presenting their incredible final projects to the Stanford community. Food will be served! The expo will take place in the CERAS building lobby, and you’re welcome to bring family and friends.

Students will be showing several different technology-enhanced learning environments and toolkits in fields such as programming, art, sexual health, biology, materials science, electronics, probability, and evolution, and much more. Below is a summary of some of the projects – come see the hard work the students put in this quarter!

Papertronics

Joy Wong Daniels (School of Ed, LDT), Adam Selzer (School of Ed, LDT), Anna Ly (School of Ed, LDT), Jeff Kessler (Engineering, ME)

Papertronics is an educational toolkit that allows 9-13 year olds to give lifelike movement to paper constructions by using simple electronics and sensors. With Papertronics, students can design and fold their own creatures that move at the press of a button, test the boundaries of material strength, or link their creations together to demonstrate the cause and effect of systems. Papertronics is an educational tool deeply rooted in constructivist and constructionist learning theories: students using Papertronics have personalized, hands-on opportunities to explore their own interests, design with their own intuitions, and test out their own ideas. Papertronics transforms the simple sheet of paper into a memorable experience that inspires curiosity and ignites student engagement.

TinkerTags

Mo Akade (School of Ed, LDT), Michael Duong (School of Ed, LDT)

TinkerTags is an wearable learning platform for 9-13 year-old "sneakerheads," those who buy, customize, and display shoes as an expression of self. The TinkerTags kit comes with a fabric unit insert to outfit shoes with electronics, LEDs with customizable housing (we call them "tags"), a sensor that detects footsteps, and a visual programming environment by which kids can program various light patterns on the shoe. TinkerTags is based on constructivist and constructionist learning theories as students learn that they have the power to control their electronics and construct their own understanding about basic computational thinking ideas like loops, conditionals, and sequential processing. The project is also rooted in critical pedagogy--introducing computational thinking ideas through culturally relevant activities by providing another way by which sneakerheads can customize their footwear.

Pleasure to Meet Me

José "Sapo" Lizårraga (School of Ed, LDT)

In traditional behavior-change approaches, sexuality and gender are typically discussed through a scientific lens that has as a primary goal the reduction of diseases and pregnancies, and promote sexual morality and restraint. A more comprehensive approach has a positive view of healthy sexuality, where sex is a source of pleasure, that needs to be understood and appreciated for better mental, physical, social and spiritual health. Pleasure to Meet Me is informed by this latter approach and aims to leverage the power of personal narratives in order for individuals to share experiences relating to gender and sexuality. Through the use of stamps representing a variety of sexual and gender markers, this tangible interface allows for the exploration of complexities inherent in identity formation as sexual beings.

Comb-Op Curriculum

Samantha Brunhaver (Engineering, ME), John Brunhaver (Engineering, EE)

The Combinatorial Optimization Curriculum empowers learners with the ability to recognize and solve non-analytic problems. A tangible toolkit serves as an "object-to-think-with" while a virtual toolkit provides practice designing and implementing algorithms. Computational literacy is an important component often missing from modern education; this curriculum begins to fill this gap such that learners can use programming to solve their own problems. This curriculum introduces learners to powerful ideas in programming, such as algorithms, recursion, abstraction, and functional composition. Our hope is that students will feel prepared to apply these ideas to both heuristic and exhaustive solutions.

Interactive Regression

Santiago Padrón (Engineering, AA). Betsy Williams (School of Education, Economics and Education)

With this kit and the accompanying curriculum, students explore why there is uncertainty in real-world data and how linear regression can be useful to describe data relationships taking into account this uncertainty. An instructor needs a white board, webcam, computer, and (computer) projector; then he just adds our software program and some simple materials (magnets and printable labels). This class demonstrator lets students plot data points on the board, guess at the best fit line, and see a computer analysis of the Ordinary Least Squares regression line projected onto the data. The curriculum includes exercises for students to generate data, which will invariably have variance even though it is precisely measured. We aim for students to build intuition about data generation and variable relationships; to understand how regression can be a useful tool; and to learn key mathematical facts about regression that are useful for calculation.

Logic Bites

Tarun Pondicherry (Engineering, EE), Vipul Redey (School of Ed, LDT), Paul Williams (School of Ed, LDT), Laura Eng (Undergraduate, Science Technology and Society)

Logic Bites is a DIY toolkit for introducing digital electronics to high school students and better equip students to understand how computers work by exposing them to logic gates, flip flops, counters and decoders. Students can use Logic Bites to design, build and explore many circuits such as a timer, festive lights and a simple calculator. The toolkit separates learning to read schematics, learning to trace signals, and digital circuit theory so students can focus on assimilating mental models one at a time. Its construction is designed to provide complete transparency, so students can explore more in depth layers of operation as they progress. Logic Bites is easily extensible and new blocks can be made using readily available items.

28

Tulsee Doshi (Undergraduate, Symbolic Systems), Ayna Agarwal (Undergraduate, Symbolic Systems)

Built using the programming language Scratch, 28 is an interactive educational tool designed to help young girls understand and accept their first period. Each day of the first cycle of 28, the tool will walk the girls through potential emotional and physical changes and barriers. By allowing the individual girl to reflect on her own feelings and gain immediate feedback, the tool becomes a source of comfort and self-exploration. In addition, 28 points the girls to reputable sources that can help girls explore themselves even more fully, and give them the confidence and opportunity to find the answers to the questions they have. The goal of 28 is to foster courage, compassion, and conviction by allowing a young girl to walk through her own personal experience from a more analytic perspective.

Breaking Point

Renee Lizcano (School of Ed, DAPS), Mariel Triggs (School of Ed, CTE)

We want to create a low-cost materials science and engineering toolkit for kids. The main object in the toolkit will be a materials testing machine that can be used to test the tension and compression of materials. We’re letting kids use the machine to quantify properties of common, low cost items used in kids’ engineering projects such as straws, paper, popsicle sticks, etc. Students can then engineer the materials, increasing desired traits and decreasing detrimental aspects. For example, the can change the shape of folded paper to increase tensile strength and then test and quantify the improvements.

3 Doors

Greg Bybee (MBA/MA-Education), Aneeqa Ishaq (MA-Education- LDT)

Teaching mathematics has often been confounded by the use of symbolic representations. In particular, introductory probability theory is often riddled with complex mathematical notation, which complicates an already difficult subject. When students get to Bayes Theory, the formulas get more complex just as the intuition suffers. A famous, but often misunderstood application of Bayesian Probability is the Monty Hall problem, but its application more often adds confusion. We use a combination of physical and virtual models, including a monte carlo simulation, to help give students intuition to better understand Bayes Theory.

Recursive Reflection

Mehjabeen Datoo (School of Education, MA-LDT), Brian Perone (School of Education, PhD-LSTD)

We have created a system of software and tangible objects to allow multiple users to capture and replay reflections art/artefacts. A user will show a tagged object to the software via a webcam and the software will allow the user to either record new reflections or review previous reflections, either their own or other users’. Users will be prompted to listen to their own reflections for particular attributes and will then "tag" these with the objects as well as evaluate it. Their evaluation will prompt the system to have them listen to another reflection evaluated at the same level as their's. By using this system, students will learn a process for reflection and develop an awareness of what they are learning and how. In particular, we think that this system can play a key role in supporting learners to access their own prior knowledge as well as help them to build on and adjust it. By relistening to their own perspectives and by being deliberately and slowly exposed to others’ perspectives, learners will be engaged in a continuous process of articulation, representation, listening, and rearticulation. These small incremental adjustments with appropriate time lags and prompts will allow learners to slowly build their knowledge of the object or idea under consideration. An added value to this could be the appreciation of different perspectives that others bring and the role that these can play in one’s own learning.

EvoFlight

Alice Chung (Engineering, BE)

EvoFlight provides an interactive platform to explore how varying simple morphological parameters of a bird can change its flight performance and fitness.