Fatima Alleyne, a native of Brooklyn, completed her Ph.D. at U. C. Berkeley in material scientist and engineering examining the thermal annealing effects of ion-implanted ceramics for sensor, actuator and energy scavenging applications. She subsequently took a job for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a research engineer while volunteering her free time with different STEM organizations focused on education equity. She has designed workshops that increase parent engagement and empowers parents to advocate for equity and equal access to resources for their students. After years of volunteering at her kids' school, Fatima Alleyne ran a grassroots campaign and was elected as trustee for the Contra Costa County Board of Education. She founded FAConsulting Services to further develop culturally relevant curricula, STEAM programs and academic services that can be implemented by schools, colleges, community-based organizations, and private sector.
Kidaptive's mission is to empower learners of all ages, and their parents and teachers, by creating a vibrant ecosystem of personalized learning experience. Dylan Arena helps guide that mission by establishing new partnerships, determining what success looks like for each partner, and overseeing all issues related to learning, assessment, and reporting. Dylan spent eleven years at Stanford University studying cognitive science, game-based learning, and next-generation assessment while earning a bachelor's degree in Symbolic Systems, a master's degree in Philosophy, a master's degree in Statistics, and a Ph.D. in Learning Sciences and Technology Design.
Britte Haugan Cheng worked as a Principal Researcher at SRI International's Center for Technology in Learning until recently, where she co-directed the Technology-Enhanced Assessments for Learning Group. Her research focuses on design of learning technologies, instruction and assessment in K-12 science, and on systemic issues of educational practice and policy. She investigates processes and designs that cross learning contexts and settings, as well as innovative research approaches to examine the role of context (e.g., she was Co-PI of the NSF project that generated the methodological framework Design-based Implementation Research).
Janet Coffey oversees the Science Learning Portfolio at the Moore Foundation. Previously, Janet was a College of Education faculty member at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests lie at the intersection of assessment and student learning in science education, and her work in this area has spanned from elementary and middle grades to undergraduate teaching and learning. Janet began her career in education at the National Research Council and also taught middle school science.
Janet has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation and recognition for teaching and graduate student mentoring. Currently, she is on the board of directors of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, a nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming science teaching and learning. She has also published and presented extensively in the science education field. Janet received a B.A. in human biology and Ph.D. in science education from Stanford University.
David Cole works at the intersection of creative learning, college and career readiness, literacy and technology. He is the Program Director for NEXMAP.org, served as research fellow at Manylabs.org, an initiative funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; and worked as a senior director with Pearson Education and the Pearson Foundation. David has developed collaboration platforms for classrooms and professional development and led curriculum design projects in and out-of-school, including STEM2STEAM, youth internships and service learning. His most recent work in 21st Century Notebooking focuses on the ways in which the rituals and routines of craft, inquiry and artistic practice can be combined with introductory electronics, fabrication techniques and open data to build multiple literacies connected with production-centered learning.
Katie McMillan Culp is the Chief Learning Officer at the New York Hall of Science, where she oversees applied research projects, exhibit and program development, educational outreach, and youth development initiatives at New York City's only hands-on science center. She leads NYSCI's research and development team, and has held leadership roles on numerous NSF- and IES-funded projects. Her current research projects leverage and inform NYSCI's efforts to create equitable informal STEM learning experiences that emphasize the interests and agency of NYSCI's highly diverse audiences, across the lifespan. She holds a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Daniel Damelin has worked in the field of education for 25 years, as a teacher, curriculum and technology developer, professional development leader, and educational researcher. Currently an employee of the nonprofit Concord Consortium, he has worked on numerous NSF- and foundation-funded projects that resulted in open educational resources to support the learning of science through simulation and data visualization, inquiry-oriented curriculum and pedagogy, and formative assessment.
Angela Haydel DeBarger is a Program Officer in Education at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Her portfolio focuses on open educational resources (OER) and the intersection of deeper learning and OER, with the aim of creating inclusive, purposeful, and coherent learning experiences for students and educators. Previously, Angela served as senior program officer for Lucas Education Research at the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where she led elementary and middle school project-based learning initiatives. From 2002 to 2014, she worked as an education researcher at SRI International. Her research focused on improving classroom pedagogy, specifically assessment strategies, to promote student learning and engagement in science.
Kristen DiCerbo is the Vice-President of Learning Research & Design at Pearson. She leads a team of researchers and designers who conduct and translate research into the development of curricula and tools. Kristen's personal research program centers on interactive technologies, particularly simulation and game-based assessment. She is also interested in how to best communicate information about performance in digital environments to inform instructional decisions. Prior to joining Pearson, Kristen was a researcher with the Networking Academies at Cisco and was a school psychologist in a local school district in Arizona. She earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Arizona State University.
Colin Dixon is a Research Associate at the Concord Consortium on the InSPECT, Paper Mechatronics, and Learning Everywhere projects. Previously, he was a member of the Beta Lab and the Center for Community and Citizen Science at the University of California, Davis. He has researched the development of STEM practices and agency among young people creating things to use and share with the world. He has written about equity and identity in making and engineering, the role of community in science learning, and how youth leverage their interests and experiences within STEM education.
Chad Dorsey is President and CEO of the Concord Consortium. Chad's professional experience ranges across the fields of science, education, and technology. Prior to joining the Concord Consortium, Chad led teacher professional development workshops as a member of the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance.
Daniel Edelson is a curriculum and software developer, educational researcher, and advocate for education reform. In his work, he draws on current research to develop products and programs that address the challenges of implementing effective science and social studies education in real-world settings. He has been the executive director of BSCS Science Learning, a nonprofit center for science education research and development, since January 2015. From 2007-2014, he was the vice president for education at the National Geographic Society. Prior to that, he was a faculty member in Learning Sciences and Computer Science at Northwestern University for 15 years.
Sam Fentress has been a software developer at the Concord Consortium for over 10ten years, mostly working on models and simulations, with a focus on agent-based and genetic models. He has been a lead developer on all of the dragon-based Geni-* family of genetics games and activities, as well as various electronics and atomic models. He is very interested in how models can teach students ideas that are hard to convey on paper. Sam has a background in AI and Cognitive Science.
Bill Finzer's mission is to get more students and teachers doing more with data in more subject areas. He leads the development of the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) at the Concord Consortium. He has been developing educational software since the days of the Commodore PET (1978). As a former physics geek he cares deeply about STEM education and inquiry approaches to teaching.
Judi Fusco, Ph.D., is a learning sciences researcher at Digital Promise. She has spent much of her career using technology to support learning and collaboration and to help close the gap between research and practice. One of her main projects is the Center for Innovative Research in Cyberlearning (CIRCL; circlcenter.org) where she works to broaden the impacts of NSF-funded projects that are creating future learning technologies. She also works on projects dedicated to helping all students succeed in STEM. Most recently she has been working to increase technology use by middle school teachers, and thinking about computational thinking in the classroom.
Jen Goree is the Director of Impact and has been at the Concord Consortium for six years. Previously, Jen managed a variety of IT, software development, and data initiatives at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Education and the Kent School District in Washington State. She started out in California developing business applications before moving into interactive educational software. Jen has an Sc.B. in computer science from Brown University and an MBA from Boston University.
Sherry Hsi is Executive Vice President of the Concord Consortium, assisting the CEO in managing and executing strategic partnerships and new opportunities with the potential to increase Concord's impact. She is also PI of the InSPECT project, and leads the Learning Everywhere initiative and other Innovation Lab projects. Prior to joining the Concord Consortium, Sherry served as a director of research at the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Exploratorium, two San Francisco Bay Area science centers. She was also a postdoc with Bob Tinker during the early years at the Concord Consortium. Sherry has designed and studied mobile inquiry, informal learning programs, science learning media, and educational apps. She co-created Howtosmile.org, the TechHive studio youth program, and the AR sandbox exhibit.
Dr. Margaret Honey joined the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) as President and CEO in November of 2008. Under her leadership, NYSCI has adopted Design-Make-Play as its signature strategy to promote STEM engagement and learning. The defining characteristics of these strategies –open-ended exploration, imaginative learning, personal relevance – are the very ingredients that develop inspired and passionate STEM learners. She holds a doctorate in developmental psychology from Columbia University and serves as a board member of the National Science Foundation's Education and Human Resources Advisory Committee, the Scratch Foundation, the Concord Consortium, and Post University.
Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, examining children and youth's changing relationships to media and communications. She is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at the University of California, Irvine. She is director of the Connected Learning Lab, and chairs the MacArthur Connected Learning Research Network. Her co-authored book, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Youth Living and Learning with New Media, describes new opportunities for interest-driven learning fueled by games, social media, and digital tools. In Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design Ito and her colleagues in the Connected Learning Research Network map out how education can embrace today's technology to make meaningful learning available to all young people. She is co-founder of Connected Camps, a benefit corporation that provides online creative learning in Minecraft for kids in all walks of life.
May-Li Khoe's work spans over 20 years in a broad range of areas: from inventing new interactions across Apple's hardware and software platforms, to building educational games at Leapfrog, to research at the MIT Media Lab. She's currently serving as VP of Design at Khan Academy. May-Li loves building systems that cultivate creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking. She also DJs, dances, and daydreams about joyful ways to subvert the status quo.
Eli Kosminsky is a software engineer and game designer at the Concord Consortium where. At Concord, he works on educational games, simulations, and data visualization tools for K-12 students. Eli comes from Boston, where he worked at the MIT Education Arcade helping build StarLogo TNG, an introductory blocks-based programming environment. He also ran New England's largest independent game festival, the Boston Festival of Indie Games, and just finished publishing his first board game, Ursa Miner,: a game about bears mining for honey.
Coe Leta Stafford is the Managing Director of IDEO U – an online school that teaches the skills of design thinking and creative innovation. Since joining IDEO in 2006, she's led numerous creative teams across diverse organizations including Microsoft, Target, Intel, Wells Fargo, Ford, eBay, Hasbro, Sesame Street, and government and healthcare groups. Known for expertise in digital design, play, and data, her work has won international awards, patents for clients, and been featured in the New York Times and Wired. Coe Leta has a Ph.D. in Education from UC Berkeley and guest lectures at Stanford University's d.School.
Leilah Lyons is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she has a dual appointment in Computer Science and the Learning Sciences, and a split appointment with the New York Hall of Science, where she serves as the Director of Digital Learning Research. Her main research interest is in the design and assessment of collaborative digital museum exhibits.
With 12+ years teaching in higher education and secondary classrooms, Jessica Parker has a passion for STEM education, extensive experience in supporting professional learning networks, and expertise in digital media and learning, maker education, and educational technology. She co-founded the Maker Certificate Program at Sonoma State University, where she was previously Chair and a tenured Associate Professor in the Curriculum Studies and Secondary Education department. She is the author of Teaching Tech-Savvy Kids: Bringing Digital Media into the Classroom. Jessica completed her undergraduate and graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley; she has a B.A. in Mass Communication and a M.A. and a Ph.D. in Education.
Kathy Perkins directs PhET Interactive Simulations at University of Colorado Boulder, and is a faculty member in Physics Education Research. Her work focuses on advancing the design and classroom use of interactive simulations to increase engagement and learning in STEM, and on scaling impact with open educational resources. She previously directed CU's Science Education Initiative. She has authored over 60 articles on STEM education. In recent years, her team launched PhET-iO sims – interoperable sims enabling customization, integration, and data – and has been a leading innovator in accessible simulations, creating new opportunities to advance learning and assessment for all students.
Jeremy Roschelle applies learning science theories and methods to understand how, when, and why technology can enable improved teaching and learning. He is nationally and internationally recognized for research in computer-supported collaborative learning; learning with connected, mobile devices; and technology in mathematics learning. He has conducted rigorous efficacy research on personalized, adaptive learning, on online homework tools, and on dynamic visualizations for mathematics learning. Jeremy has a longstanding role as Associate Editor for the Journal of the Learning Sciences and leads a large community of National Science Foundation-funded projects in the area of cyberlearning.
Natalya St. Clair is a Research Associate / Project Coordinator for CODAP, UKDE, and Data Science Games at the Concord Consortium. Prior to thisjoining the Concord Consortium, she combined her background in art, mathematics, and education to create a series of successful TED-Ed lessons on the intersection of art and mathematics. Her art is featured in mental math books with Dr. Arthur Benjamin at Harvey Mudd College and Dr. Jonathon Kane at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her speaking tours highlight the use of art education to further math education on a national level. Natalya earned her B.A. in art and mathematics at Scripps College and Ed.M. at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Lori Takeuchi, Ph.D., is Acting Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. She started at the Cooney Center as a postdoctoral fellow in 2008 and also served as the organization's senior director of research. Lori has published reports, book chapters, and peer-reviewed journal articles on a range of topics in the digital media and learning space. Before earning her Ph.D. in the learning sciences from Stanford University, Lori designed curriculum-based geoscientific visualization and simulation tools for BBN Educational Technologies, Riverdeep, and LOGAL Software. She began her career working in instructional TV at Thirteen/WNET.
Carol Tang is the Executive Director of the Children's Creativity Museum located in SF's SOMA district. The museum serves over 100,000 visitors annually, with 62% people of color and 17% coming through free access initiatives. Previously, Carol was a Program Officer at the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, overseeing strategic grantmaking for its out-of-school time portfolio, Director of the national Coalition for Science After School, and head of exhibits and public programs at the California Academy of Sciences during their 2008 re-opening. She serves on the Board of Directors of the National Afterschool Association and the How Kids Learn Foundation.
Adam Z. Tobin is the Chabot Space & Science Center Executive Director and CEO. He brings more than 20 years' combined experience in informal education, first building successful, creative business ventures and then applying that same entrepreneurial spirit within the nonprofit sector.
Before joining Chabot, Adam served as the Director of Global Studios at the Exploratorium, responsible for furthering the museum's mission of transformative education by building partnerships with and providing creative services to institutions around the world. Previously, Adam was the Director of Exhibit Development at the Exploratorium, where he led a group of more than 40 creative professionals, including exhibit developers, fabricators, writers, graphic artists, new media developers and web designers.
Prior to joining the Exploratorium, Adam was an award-winning toy inventor and founder of two educational toy development and manufacturing companies. Adam also moonlights as a mechanical artist, creating large kinetic contraptions that attempt to capture the whimsy of his earlier toy creations. Adam holds a B.A. in Music from Brandeis University.
Helen Quinn is Professor Emerita of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Helen is an internationally recognized theoretical physicist who holds multiple medals. Most recently, she won the 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. She is a fellow and former president of the American Physical Society. Helen is originally from Australia and is an Honorary Officer of the Order of Australia. She is well known as a science education proponent, co-chair of the committee that wrote "A Framework for K-12 science education," defining the vision of "3-dimensional" science learning.
Bret Victor is an interface designer, computer scientist, and electrical engineer known for his talks on the future of technology. He currently works as a researcher at Dynamicland. He started in electrical engineering, enthralled by bringing magic into the real world, and created a line of bestselling and award-winning electronic musical instruments. He then turned to UI design, to invent tools for understanding. His work twice won the Apple Design Award, including an e-book on climate change with Al Gore that "transforms the act of reading into something totally new" Upon joining Apple, Bret's work established the "HID Proto" future-interfaces prototyping group, whose inventions have shaped the last decade of Apple products. Leaving Apple in order to work in the public domain, his research into dynamic media for understanding systems yielded a series of talks, including Inventing on Principleand Media For Thinking The Unthinkable, which received wide industry acclaim and spawned numerous products and companies. Design legend Edward Tufte recognized Bret as a "design theory wizard, at the cutting edge of interface designs for programming, seeing, reasoning."
Driven by the need for a new medium to understand and address the world's critical problems, Bret co-founded the CDG research lab with computing pioneer Alan Kay, and finally discovered how to close the loop and bring dynamic media into the real world. After three years inventing and prototyping the foundations of Dynamicland, his team is ready to make it a reality.
Lauren Walters, a San Francisco resident, is a lawyer and entrepreneur. He currently is a board member of health care and educational technology companies and an advisor to early-stage ventures. He provides management and strategic consulting to the private and public sectors. Lauren has been a private investor in early-stage new media, technology, and biotechnology companies. He chaired the board of the Consensus Building Institute for more than 15 years.
Caroline Windell has been in education for the past 25 years. During that time, she has taught 5th grade humanities, 4th grade math and science, and K-8 technology. Over the past seven years, she has introduced and developed a STEM program at The Hamlin School in San Francisco that includes coding, robotics, and basic computer science concepts.
Decision trees & machine learning
Students' understanding of decision trees can be grounded in experience by building them from scratch using real data. In so doing, students confront tradeoffs associated with balancing the cost of false positives with the cost of false negatives. We embed a simple game and a tree-making tool in CODAP (Common Online Data Analysis Platform), setting up a sequence of increasingly difficult scenarios in which students analyze data to inform tree-building, use their tree to make decisions manually, and then turn the tree loose on many cases. Understanding decision trees is foundational for computational thinking.
Explore probability with CODAP
Put one red, one green, and one blue ball in a bag and sample from the bag five times with replacement. What proportion of the time will all five balls have the same color? With a sample plug-in used with CODAP (Common Online Data Analysis Platform), middle schoolers can make sense of this simple probability game, then modify it to create an infinite variety of probability models. Understanding sampling variability is fundamental to making sense of statistical inference, an important framework in this age of big data.
A medium for universal computational literacy
Dynamicland is a computer where people literally work together, face-to-face, with eye contact and many hands. It's as multiplayer as the real world. Begin your Dynamicland experience by exploring the basics of how to create an interactive experience using paper and projectors. Meet the designers of Dynamicland's environment.
Explore SageModeler
Understanding the complexity of the natural world is empowering. It provides us with a sense that we can make a difference and solve difficult problems. Being able to engage in civil discourse about how to effect positive change requires an understanding of systems and how the components of a system can interact and produce emergent behavior that is more than the sum of its parts. Systems modeling is a powerful lens for viewing the world around us. SageModeler makes possible the construction of complex systems models without the need for coding or equations, opening up the experience of model building, testing, and revising to students as young as middle school.
Natural selection in Dynamicland
Experience this classic agent-based simulation where "turtles" wander around, eat die, reproduce, and gradually adapting to their environment but in a transparent, embodied, and collaborative Dynamicland environment.
Turn a dial on a Lazy Susan turntable to program. The cameras can recognize the angle of the paper relative to the table to produce a range of values. Place a dial near other pages to adjust parameters like the food production rate. Students can also engage creatively with the simulation. For instance, a student can draw a picture of a carrot and place it in the corner of a page to change the way it's represented in the ecosystem.
Creative engineering with papercrafts
Paper is a versatile medium that can be found in most classrooms and homes. Paper Mechatronics is exploring ways to provide onramps to creative engineering, blending arts, mechanical design, coding, and electronics together. Through Paper Mechatronics, children can create true working devices – machines, robots, toys, automata, kinetic artwork – using paper as the foundational building material.
Civic engagement with notebooks of the future
Data is useful only when it has a story to tell. Even trained scientists can find it challenging to conceive of an important and answerable research problem. Open Data, Open Minds (ODOM) allows everyone to develop research problems, create scientific investigations, and then use their findings to impact civic outcomes. Open Data/Open Minds is a prototyping initiative that explores the possibilities of connected learning, fabrication, open data, and civic engagement. It supports learners and their communities to convey stories of local concern using science journaling, crafted visualization, and data investigation.
Internet-of-Things devices for science
Scientists and engineers build instruments to control, measure, and collect data about scientific phenomena. Dataflow software with do-it-yourself sensor kits are providing learners with opportunities to design their own experiments. Using this kit, learners can experiment with biological phenomena, data, and computation. Grow, explore, and monitor gas exchanges, cellular respiration, and biotic factors in an ecochamber with plants.
Sensing and seeing science through modeling matter
Early learners have significant—and highly untapped—potential for understanding abstract concepts and reasoning in sophisticated ways. Research has shown that technology offers powerful support for conceptual science learning in the early grades. Since heat and temperature are invisible, the Concord Consortium designed new digital tools to help make the invisible visible and link the visualizations directly to children's tangible perceptions of hot and cold. See different demonstrations that show how digital representations blended with physical phenomena can support learning. Tools include IR cameras and IR thermometers, graduated-color representations, mixed-reality model of heat flow, and a Thermoscope.