Date: April 10, 2018
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
Location: 624 SW 12th Street, Gainesville, FL, 32611
Host: UF CISE Department
Admission: This event is free and open to the public.

Active Learning Through Technology: On Wearables, Makerspaces, and Embodied Enactment

Abstract: My research explores how learning through technology innovations can be active, experiential, and self-driven. In this talk, three projects with elementary school children will be presented that embody this vision in authentic educational contexts.

The first project investigates the design of digitally-augmented enactment-based learning environments to support creative storytelling for children in language arts.

The second project examines how the smartwatch, one of the most commercially successful forms of wearable technology to date, can be used to support situated learning of science in the students’ everyday lives.

And the third project describes results from a longitudinal study of integrating Making activities into the formal elementary school science classroom and curriculum.

All the projects contribute to our understanding of children’s behaviors in technology-based learning contexts, and derive design implications for learning technologies.

Biography: Dr. Sharon Lynn Chu is an assistant professor in the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University, and the Director of the StoryLab@Texas A&M. Sharon has a Ph.D. in HCI from Texas A&M University, and a M.S. in Computer Science & Applications as well as a graduate certificate in HCI from Virginia Tech. She obtained her Bachelor of Social Sciences with First Class Honors in Communication & New Media from the National University of Singapore. She has previously worked at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction (CHCI) and the Institute of Creativity, Arts and Technology (ICAT) at Virginia Tech, Kodak Research Labs, the MIT Gambit GameLab, and the Interactive and Digital Media Institute (IDMI) in Singapore.