AAALAB - Key Persons
Aman Desai is a Social Science Research Professional in the AAALab at the Graduate School of Education. He currently works on research projects involving virtual field trips - specifically, how creating and consuming virtual field trips can help students learn science in an engaging way. Previously, he taught math and an after-school electronics class at Khan Lab School, Palo Alto and obtained a BA in Physics from Pomona College.
Professor Daniel L. Schwartz is the director of the AAALab. Dr. Schwartz taught middle-school for many years, before undertaking a PhD in Human Learning and Cognition at Columbia University. His niche is the ability to bridge basic research on human cognition with creative designs and experiments to improve STEM learning, often using computer technology.
Daniel Pimentel is a doctoral student studying Science Education with a cross-specialization in Learning Sciences and Technology Design. He holds a B.S. in Biology and an M.Ed in Secondary Education from Boston College. He also received an Advanced Certificate in Special Education from the Relay Graduate School of Education in New York City. Daniel has taught both middle school science and high school chemistry in Brooklyn. Currently, he is interested in understanding how anchored instruction can support the teaching and learning of scientific practices when students investigate contextualized, real-world phenomena.
Diego Sierra Huertas is a fellow researcher in the AAA Lab. He is interested in the affective, motivational, and cognitive changes throughout adulthood that influence how older people learn. He aims to design adaptive technologies that lever the qualities and individual differences in life experience that come with growing older. He primarily works in workforce development and grandparents' education.
Don is a programmer and an alumnus of the lab. He lent his skills to bring Stats Invaders (Arena & Schwartz, 2013) and R2 to fruition.
Don has been inventing games and puzzles for years. Every once in a while, he comes up with something other people find interesting. A game he originally called Robot Rampage was published in Germany as "Crash" and more recently as "Manoover" in the US.
After becoming frustrated with computer games that had to cheat in order to be competitive, he wrote the shareware game "Cloak, Dagger and DNA," which used genetic algorithms to evolve computer opponents. The intent was that they would be able to play well against humans playing by the same rules, which was achieved. He wrote a short paper on how it works and somehow managed to get it published in an issue of Game Developer Magazine (Feb/Mar 1996). Every now and then, he hears about a published paper that mentions it as an example of developing AI with genetic algorithms.
Other than his work at Stanford and NASA Ames, he burned through a number of hi-tech startups that didn't go anywhere. Retired now, he's working on an economic simulation for fun.
Job Titles:
- Researcher With the Human - Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research
Doris B. Chin is a researcher with the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research (H-STAR) Institute at Stanford University. She received her Ph.D. in Genetics at the University of California, Davis, working on disease resistance in plants. She likes to think that she has done her part in ensuring that people eat their veggies. She also spent many years as a science museum educator, an experience which provides her a unique, perhaps tilted, perspective on academic research.
Rachel Wolf is a researcher in the AAALab. She received her Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied Type Ia supernova cosmology. Rachel is passionate about STEM education and engagement both in and out of the classroom. She has worked at The Griffith Observatory, interned with Discovery Communications, and served as a volunteer outreach scientist with The Franklin Institute. She was one of the co-founders of the education and outreach committee for The Dark Energy Survey, where she managed, facilitated, and designed programming for an international collaboration of 400+ scientists. Rachel also has extensive teaching experience. She has taught undergraduate physics laboratories, been trained in and designed curricula for active-learning undergraduate physics courses, and engaged as a math instructor and tutor.