Dustin P
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)
Expertise
Scaling educational opportunities with computational systems, UX, Design, Web Development
Bio
I'm a researcher, designer, and web developer on a mission to improve education. My work focuses on leveraging computational technologies and media in new ways to provide educational opportunities – at scale. For example, one system that we're building is a web application that aims to teach qualitative analysis to large classes (an experience that is typically only reserved for a few top students in research labs). By collecting from student users, we can scale mentorship via peers teaching one another (e.g. by comparing your work to other students' work) and even with intelligent systems (e.g. an AI system that gives you hints when you're stuck). On a more personal level, I'm from Hawaii and moved to California to pursue my dream of founding an ed-tech startup (much like Polygence!). I love being outdoors (body surfing, hiking, camping) and learning about random things (startups, cooking, stocks, gardening, etc). If any of this sounds interesting to you, I'd love to chat and work on something cool together!Project ideas
A web/mobile application for helping students learn through better Q&A in the classroom
Learning something new is already challenging on its own, and the trend toward larger and larger classes makes this even more difficult. Students can raise their hand to ask a question but this often doesn’t work well. For example, students may 1) not know what they should even be asking, 2) hold up lecture by asking a question that has already been answered, or even 3) be too shy to ask a question in the first place – a feeling we have all felt before. How might we improve the asking and answering of questions in the classroom, to better support learning? In this project, we introduce a web/mobile application that makes peer-to-peer and peer-to-mentor asking and answering as frictionless as possible. In the app, users can 1) see all questions and answers ranked by upvotes, 2) quickly search through all past posts, and 3) post anonymously if desired. We design and evaluate the system through user task analysis, heuristic evaluation, and user interviews and surveys. This study finds that, overall, users greatly prefer our application over traditional classroom methods because it helps them learn more easily, and that user preferences for interfaces depend heavily on the learning context. Technologies: Figma design, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Angular, Firebase, Google Domains Skills/methods learned: Web development, UX research, UI design, Qualitative analysis