This page summarizes my work in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University and Arizona State University.

Dissertation Research
I have a PhD in Educational Technology from Arizona State University. I created two casual games to teach Newtonian mechanics (velocity, acceleration, basic forces, etc.). The games were tested with high school students, undergraduates, and even a few graduate students (about 100 players total). I managed to get some improvement on test items from the Force Concept Inventory, a widely used test to evaluate student knowledge of forces and basic mechanics after a first course. Something that distinguishes my work is the use of Bayesian statistics. I lean towards Bayesian statistics because the interpretation is more meaningful and intuitive than frequentist statistics, which is what students learn in school. Bayesian statistics tells you the probability of the hypothesis given the data, which is what most researchers and businesses really want to know. You can say things like: “There’s a 90% chance that the average increase in scores is within this interval of values.”

Dr. James Paul Gee was my adviser. Dr. Brian Nelson, Dr. Robert Atkinson, and Dr. Scott Stevens (Carnegie Mellon University) were on my committee.

Courses and Projects
Here is the list of courses that I took at Carnegie Mellon University and Arizona State University along with related projects, which are described on the Portfolio page. The Master of Entertainment Technology program at the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University, is a professional program with an emphasis on hands-on project work for clients or student-pitched projects. Most students enter the entertainment industry, especially the video game industry or location-based entertainment such as the various Disney companies. The Educational Technology PhD program at Arizona State University was an instructional design program. Courses gravitated toward the behaviorist and cognitive science traditions (ADDIE, ISD, Mager-style learning objectives, Kirkpatrick evaluation levels, etc.) although the faculty were very open to different theoretical approaches.

CV
This is the latest version of my academic CV.