NEW TECH ASSISTS LEARNING A recent graduate discovers the nearly endless possibilities for educational technology. WRITTEN BY LESLIE MERTZ PHOTO BY CAROLYN LAGATTUTA, UC SANTA CRUZ
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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
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NE SEMESTER IN PROFESSOR ZACHARY DODDS’
computer science lab at Harvey Mudd College was all it took to hook Veronica Rivera ’17 on doing research and finding new ways to learn. And she’s been doing both ever since. That includes designing new learning technology for children with autism, for college students and for job-seeking adults. During her sophomore year in Dodds’ lab, Rivera and four other students teamed up on a project to create a cameraequipped robot capable of reading a three-dimensional map and navigating a space on its own. “I liked how collaborative the atmosphere felt, working on a big project with other students and doing it while we were still learning (the basic) ideas and receiving support from a great mentor, such as Professor Dodds,” she says. After she earned her joint computer science and math degree from HMC in 2017, Rivera joined a research group that was exploring a new educational approach for children with autism. Part of the Assistive Sociotechnical Solutions for Individuals with Special Needs (ASSIST) Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), the group was doing the groundwork for a system that would employ facial recognition software to read a child’s emotional state and then respond in a way that inspired further learning, she explains. “For example, if a child was working on an educational iPod game, the idea was for the technology to detect that he was sad or frustrated. The technology would then respond by prompting the child or repeating information, or by telling the child to take a step back and do some other small activities to get him back on track so he could then complete the educational activity.” Rivera contributed to the ASSIST lab for nearly a year with much of her time spent interviewing teachers, school psychologists and speech language pathologists about different techniques they use to facilitate learning. That opened her eyes to the science of education and got her thinking about how educational technology could be used to reach a broad audience, which in turn, led her to UCSC Professor David Lee’s Tech4Good lab. The Tech4Good lab specializes in social computing, or the use of computer systems to reach and connect people. In particular, Rivera was intrigued by the lab’s Causeway project. Causeway is a wide-ranging educational technology that endeavors to help college students learn marketable skills while also providing an online but real-world, hands-on experience—the kind of experience that students need in order to land their first internships or first jobs, says Rivera, who officially joined the Causeway team in January. The Causeway platform works like this: A marketable skill, such as webpage development, is broken down into a series of online tasks that students learn and complete one by one. The tasks are designed to be simple at first and increase in
