What if learning to be a researcher were like playing a game? What if participating in research was like reading interactive fiction?
This project is creating an online environment called StudyCrafter, that uses artificial intelligence and narrative to guide university students through the process of designing and conducting experiments. In making it easy to create, run, replicate, and build upon others’ research studies across disciplines (e.g., social sciences, user studies), this platform can potentially transform social science research practices while also fostering new scientific discoveries.
In collaboration with Casper Harteveld (PI, Northeastern University), Gillian Smith (Worcestor Polytechnic Institute), and Stephen Sutherland (University of Houston-Clear Lake), we are studying the process by which students in higher education learn to conduct experimental research, and the roles of AI assistance, collaboration, narrative, and activities motivated by curiosity, exploration, and reflection.
Funding for this project is provided by the National Science Foundation: a collaborative research Cyberlearning under awards #1736056 /1736065 / 1736185.
Topics
- Higher education, undergraduate education
- Learning to design and conduct research experiments
- Artificial intelligence
- Game-like learning
- Narrative
- Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning
- Online learning
- Designing learning environments
Opportunities to participate
- Design research studies, including data collection methods and assessment rubrics
- Analyze data (classroom observations, interviews, logged data)
Publications & Presentations
Matuk, C., Amato, A., Sui, J., Sutherland, S. & Harteveld, C. (2022). Inform, empathize, inquire: How youth use participatory storytelling to engage with social issues. In, Proceedings of the International Conference for the Learning Sciences, The International Society for the Learning Sciences.
Altoff, W., Duke, T., Schouten, D., Harteveld, C., Matuk, C., Smith, G. & Sutherland, S. (2020). User support systems: Lessons learned from implementing multiple interaction methods during testing. Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES2020). Online.
Mahajan, S., Bunyea, L., Partlan, N., Schouten, D., Harteveld, C., Matuk, C., Althoff, W., Duke, T., Sutherland, S. & Smith, G. (2019, Oct 8-9). Toward Automated Critique for Student-Created Interactive Narrative Projects. Experimental AI in Games (EXAG) workshop, In, Proceedings of the 15th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-19). Atlanta, GA.
Partlan, N., Carstensdottir, E., Kleinman, E., Snodgrass, S., Harteveld, C., Smith, G., Matuk, C., Sutherland, S.C. & Seif El-Nasr, M. (2019, Aug 26-30). Evaluation of an automatically-constructed graph-based representation for interactive narrative. UX of AI ’19: The 2019 Workshop on User Experience of Artificial Intelligence in Games In Proceedings of the Foundations of Digital Games 2019 (FDG 2019). San Luis Obispo, CA.
Sutherland, S., Altoff, W., Amato, A., Bunyea, L., Duke, T., Harteveld, C., Matuk, C., Olguin, K., Partlan, N., Seif El-Nasr, M., Snodgrass, S., Smith, G. (2020). Analysis of Design Decisions on Reinforcing Stereotypes in Games. Poster presented at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA. (Conference canceled).
Matuk, C., Sutherland, S., Althoff, W., Snodgrass, S. Partlan, N. Smith, G., Seif El-Nasr, M. & Harteveld, C. (2019, Apr 5-9). Synergies between research and game design: Reflections on interactive narrative experiments by student game designers. Poster presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Toronto, ON.