Stanford University School of Education's Learning, Design and Technology (LDT) program will host its annual Master's Project Exposition on Friday, July 25 from 3 to 6 p.m. in Wallenberg Hall, Building 160 on the Main Quad at the Stanford campus. This tech expo will feature 17 master's students showing and discussing their projects demonstrating the latest designs of technology-based learning products and environments.
The projects address an array of topics, including Dana Nelson and Claudia Jimenez's "NutriChef," an educational game that helps children learn about nutrition and become healthier eaters by virtually preparing and planning nutritionally balanced meals; "CAIA: A College Advising Intelligent Agent," an interactive, web-based college counselor by Doug Gilbert and Sara Petry that provides personalized advising resources to low-income high school students; and "Future Culture Adventure (FCA): A Language and Culture Learning Program in Virtual Reality," a virtual language learning environment created by Hannah Cho, Lin Hur, and Hiroshi Sasaki that helps adult learners develop foreign language skills and an understanding of world cultures through interactive and authentic learning experiences.
Other LDT projects featured at the Expo will include Nesra Yanniyer's "HomeFun," an online homework platform that features interactive educational games and enables teachers to track student progress; Olga Trusova's "ShelterNet," a Web-based recommendation engine that helps transitional youth in after school programs develop "life skills"; Michiko Lynn Powers and Junko Tanaka's "StepOne," an interactive lifestyle learning platform for middle school kids that promotes exercise and healthy eating; and "Technology and the City," an animated elementary math curriculum by Annie Lien, Evelyn Kung, and Scott Ullman. The expo will also showcase "Kiva School to School," an online environment by Jim Ratcliffe that enables school-based groups to collaboratively plan, implement, and share service learning projects; Jaime Koh's "Supporting Different Learning Styles in Education," an online environment that can be customized to support individual learning styles; and Neha Kumar's "Banking 101: Towards Financial Empowerment of India's Poor," a mobile application that educates and empowers inhabitants of rural India who are unaware of their financial options.
LDT master's students conceive and develop the projects of their own initiative, and conduct background research, user testing, and learner assessments to help formulate their work. The content and design of each project are substantiated by educational theory.
Established in 1997, the goal of the LDT master's program is to prepare professionals who will bring powerful contemporary ideas about learning to the design of technology-based products, settings, and social arrangements for learning. The program provides students with an intensive year of study in the basics of learning, design and technology, including a yearlong internship and course work. Students who complete the one-year program earn the degree of Master of Arts in Education.
For more information about the LDT program, visit http://ldt.stanford.edu. For directions to the expo, see http://wallenberg.stanford.edu/top/location.html.