Stanford's LDT Expo presents latest EdTech designs

Stanford, CA – Stanford University Learning, Design and Technology (LDT) Master’s Program invites the public to its fifteenth annual Master’s Project Exposition on Friday, August 3 from 4 to 6:30 p.m. in the Center for Education Research at Stanford at 520 Galvez Mall on the Stanford campus. Guests will explore ideas and prototypes that apply emergent technologies to longstanding learning challenges.

The projects on display at the expo are the hallmark of the LDT Master’s Program at Stanford’s School of Education—representing the culmination of a year of empirical and theoretical engagement with some of the toughest challenges to learning and education. LDT students devise tools to drive learning at multiple levels, including organizational learning for school districts, as with Chalk (Sarah Chou and Qian Wang). Chalk leverages crowdsourcing of local knowledge to facilitate collaboration across school systems and transform school decision-making.

The LDT Expo will showcase new perspectives on lifelong learning, and STEM and literacy education, as well as new technology-enhanced learning environments that expand resources available for non-traditional learning, such as:

TinkerTags: Empowering Today's Youth, One Step at a Time (Mo Akade and Mike Duong), creative footwear that put young learners on the ramp towards computing experiences.

Hip Hip Array: Multiplication Games on a Two-Dimensional Array (Lisa Peterson) enables discovery of mathematical patterns and structure through games.

Me.Mu: Social Learning through Playful Movement (Hain-Lee Hsueh and Anna Ly) uses playful movement to engage autistic children in practicing social skills and developing motor coordination.

Handily: Gaming Your Way to a Job (Aneeqa Ishaq and Vipul S Redey), a gaming experience offering vocational training for blue-collar workers in India.

Grandma's Trunk: An Intergenerational Media Sharing App (Daniela Steinsapir), collaborative activities that connect grandparents with their grandchildren.

The Presence Project (Emily Goligoski), tangible tools that encourage mindful Internet usage for parents and children.

Amplify Ghana (Katie McFeely) captures the one-to-one conversations that domain experts have with local farmers and shares them with entire villages.

These and twelve other master’s projects will be featured at this year’s expo.

Industry professionals, school teachers, LDT alumni, and a multidisciplinary faculty from Stanford will evaluate the students’ projects in the closed presentation portion of the event. This year, reviewers include experts from Imagine K12, Nokia Research, ISKME, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and the Tech Museum. 

Also at the Expo:

• KaiPals (Jennifer Bundy) gives children opportunities to learn about the ocean through play at home; Go Go Games (Alexis Hiniker, Joy Wong Daniels, and Heidi Williamson), a casual video game that helps children with autism spectrum disorders improve perceptual skills; and DanceCuento (David Malpica), a gaming tool that connects teen and adult learners through folk dance and lore.

• Conceptualyze (Aaron Loh) helps middle schoolers learn through organizing and exploring domains of knowledge with online concept-mapping tools; Perligo: Read a Language, Learn a Language (Alicja Żenczykowska) leverages authentic online content in lessons; and Recursive Reflection (Mehjabeen Datoo) allows multiple users to capture, reflect on and replay reflections about historical artifacts.

• Music motivates skills practice while enhancing creative expression in EduBeats (Paul Williams), and enhances storytelling in VidIZY (Gabriel Lomeli and Felipe Baytelman); Pleasure to Meet Me (José Lizárraga) allows individuals to explore the complexities of gender and sexual identity formation through audio narratives and tangible identity markers; and Idiomology (Christine Chow) uses videos to help learners understand figurative language.

• Bicycles and shoelaces combine with new technologies to unlock insights in Bike to Scale (Stephanie Chang), which engages a public audience in learning about energy and scale, and Super Laces (Adam Selzer), which helps kids learn self-reliance by teaching them how to tie their shoes.

Now in its fifteenth year, Stanford’s LDT Master’s Program prepares professionals to bring powerful contemporary ideas about learning to the design of technology-based products, experiences, and social arrangements for learning. The program provides students with an intensive year of study that combines coursework with research and development experiences in learning theories, design process, and evaluation. Students who complete the full-time program earn the degree of Master of Arts in Education. For more information about the LDT program, visit http://ldt.stanford.edu. Directions to the LDT Expo can be found at: http://ed.stanford.edu/about/maps-directions.

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