Embedded Files
PROJECT ARCHIVE
PROJECT ARCHIVE
For the most up-to-date info on current projects, please head over to RIDDLE Lab!
Educational technology design
Educational technology design
The Idea Manager (2010-present)
This tool is designed to scaffold students' documenting and distinguishing their developing ideas over the course of science inquiry projects. It breaks down the task of writing extended narrative explanations and arguments into more manageable chunks. Similar to how researchers once filed their ideas on note cards in preparation to write, students use the Idea Manager to collect, categorize, and sort their ideas as they encounter new information in the activities of a WISE unit. By encouraging students to be reflective and deliberative in preparing their explanations, the Idea Manager facilitates the process of students building an integrated understanding of complex topics in science.
Recently, we have incorporated collaborative features into the Idea Manager, which allow students to share ideas with their classmates. With these features, I am studying the factors that determine when and why students contribute or copy ideas, and the impacts of such collaborative technologies on students' learning.
Learn more about the Idea Manager from its lead technology developer, and read a report of our findings from its first classroom tests.
An Idea Basket is persistently available within the curriculum unit interface. Through a pop-up window, students can add idea entries of up to 150 characters, identify their sources, and apply a number of curriculum author-supplied tags and labels.
Idea entries accumulate in a list that is accessible for reference and revision at any point in the unit. All students’ revisions in the Idea Manager are logged and available as records for research.
The Explanation Builder space permits students to organize their ideas into different author-specified categories. Students may revise their sorted ideas, and as with students’ other revisions, these are logged by the WISE system.
Relevant publications
Matuk, C. F., McElhaney, K., King Chen, J., Miller, D., Lim-Breitbart, J., & Linn, M. C. (2012). The Idea Manager: A tool to scaffold students in documenting, sorting, and distinguishing ideas during science inquiry. In The Future of Learning: Proceedings of the 10th international conference for the learning sciences. Sydney, Australia: International Society of the Learning Sciences. [PDF]
McElhaney, K. W., Matuk, C.F., Miller, D.I. & Linn, M.C. (2012). Using the Idea Manager to Promote Coherent Understanding of Inquiry Investigations. In The Future of Learning: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference of the Learning Sciences. Sydney, Australia: International Society of the Learning Sciences. [PDF]
Matuk, C. F., King Chen, J., & Linn, M. C. (2012). The WISE Idea Manager: A tool to scaffold the collaborative construction of evidence-based explanations from dynamic scientific visualizations. In The Discovery Research K-12 PI Meeting. Arlington, VA: Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education (CADRE).
Matuk, C. F., & King Chen, J. (2011). The WISE Idea Manager: A Tool to Scaffold the Collaborative Construction of Evidence-Based Explanations from Dynamic Scientific Visualizations. In J. Shen & H.-Y. Chang (Eds.), Symposium 3, Learning Interactions – Collaboration as Scaffolding: Learning Together with Dynamic, Interactive Scientific Visualizations and Computer Models, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Support (Vol. 3, pp. 1029–1036). Hong Kong.
Matuk, C., & King Chen, J. (2011). WISE Ideas: A technology-enhanced curriculum to scaffold students' generating data, managing evidence, and reasoning about the seasons. (Teacher design focus group). In The Cyberlearning Tools for STEM Education Conference. Berkeley, CA.
The Image Annotator (2011-present)
This Flash-based tool encourages students’ close observation of visual evidence during online science inquiry projects. It allows them to attach annotations to different parts of an image or looping animation, and to revise these annotations as their thinking develops. Integrated into the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment, students' interactions with the tool are logged. These data logs not only allow teachers to give students’ formative feedback on their work, but also permit researchers to track students’ developing observational skills in tandem with their conceptual understanding. The logged data also provide insights to designers on the impacts both of teachers’ feedback and of the unit on students’ learning.
[Try it]
Relevant publications
Relevant publications
Matuk, C. F. & Linn, M. C. (2013, April 27 - May 1). Technology Integration to Scaffold and Assess Students Use of Visual Evidence In Science Inquiry. Paper to be presented at the American Educational Research Association Meeting (AERA2013): Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis, San Francisco, CA, USA. [AERA Design & Technology SIGOutstanding Research Presentation Award 2013]
Technologies for orchestrating science inquiry in the classroom
Technologies for orchestrating science inquiry in the classroom
Visualizing student data to support teachers' decision making (2011-present)
As part of the CLASS project, I'm designing tools that leverage machine-scored student work and automated feedback to inform teachers' instructional decisions, and students' reflection and revision.
Understanding student learning
Understanding student learning
Students' strategies for learning from scientific visualizations (2010-present)
Student interviews and assessment item designs toward the goal of understanding how students approach visualizations, and how visualizations can be designed to take advantage of students' existing abilities, and to encourage inquiry.
Curriculum design
Curriculum design
Mitosis & Cell Processes (2011-present)
In this Life Sciences unit, middle school students (grades 5-8) learn the phases of cell division by investigating potential cancer medicines, and are guided to reconstruct cellular processes from rich visual evidence. Designed in the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE), this online unit features videos and animations, and various embedded assessment types. My specific contributions included substantial revisions to the language and visual design of an early version of this unit, as well as the design and integration of two recent WISE tools: The Idea Manager and the Image Annotator (see descriptions above).
Relevant publications
Relevant publications
Matuk, C. F. & Linn, M. C. (2013, April 27 - May 1). Technology Integration to Scaffold and Assess Students Use of Visual Evidence In Science Inquiry. Paper to be presented at the American Educational Research Association Meeting (AERA2013): Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis, San Francisco, CA, USA. [AERA Design & Technology SIGOutstanding Research Presentation Award 2013]
Matuk, C. F. & Linn, M. C. (2013, April 27 - May 1). Technology Integration to Scaffold and Assess Students Use of Visual Evidence In Science Inquiry. Paper to be presented at the American Educational Research Association Meeting (AERA2013): Education and Poverty: Theory, Research, Policy and Praxis, San Francisco, CA, USA. [AERA Design & Technology SIGOutstanding Research Presentation Award 2013]
From http://www.microscopyu.com/
Designing a detergent to clean marine oil spills (2012-present)
Designing a detergent to clean marine oil spills (2012-present)
This unit engages high school students in the chemistry of detergents, and how these help save wildlife endangered by marine oil spills. In doing so, it integrates standards-based topics in polarity, intermolecular attractions, and solubility. My specific contribution included substantial revisions to the narrative, as well as the visual redesign of an earlier version of this same unit. Created in the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE), this unit features the Idea Manager, as well as well as a novel simulation custom-made by collaborators at the Concord Consortium.
Who inherits cystic fibrosis?: Simple genetic inheritance (2013)
Who inherits cystic fibrosis?: Simple genetic inheritance (2013)
In this middle school unit, students learn about simple genetic inheritance by investigating the family history of a boy's cystic fibrosis. The unit covers dominant and recessive allele transmission, the relation between phenotypes and genotypes, and concepts of probability. My contribution included substantial visual redesigns of the earlier version of the unit, and the integration of the collaborative Idea Manager.
Illustration, animation, and design
Illustration, animation, and design
Animal cell mitosis (2011-present)
A Flash animation with playback controls that visualizes mitosis in an animal cell. The rendering of this animation attempts to portray the 3-dimensionality of the cell, which is in contrast to the typical 2-dimensional depictions students tend to see in textbooks.
[View it]
Children's picture books (2004-present)
On-again/off-again stories and illustrations for picture books, including some that introduce concepts of quantum mechanics to young readers. [Read more]
PAST
PAST
Dissertation (2006-2010)
Interpreting Visual Narrative Media (2006-2010)
Projects from my PhD in Learning Sciences at Northwestern University
Games, animations, interactives
Games, animations, interactives
Interactive flu tree (2009)
An influenza tree with clades that rotate on clicking the coloured nodes, and pop-up boxes that appear when you click on the labels at the branch tips. The intention behind this interactive was to highlight the 3D structure of phylogenetic trees, a detail that is not immediately apparent to novices interpreting these expert diagrams, and that may be a source of many misinterpretations and misunderstandings of phylogenetic relationships. This piece was a prototype for an iPad-based matching game eventually developed for the SEPA-funded project, World of Viruses. In the game, players help scientists determine the phylogeny of an unknown virus as a first step toward developing a vaccine. They have to rotate the clades of one tree diagram to match the structure of another in order to determine whether or not the trees are identical.
[Try it]
How to Build a Cladogram (2008)
This Flash application was created to show users how to build and intrpret tree diagrams of species phylogenies, which are crucial diagrams for reasoning in evolutionary biology. It takes users through a series of activities that guide them to represent classifications of fictitious animals based on their morphological characteristics.
Featured in this application are hand-drawn images, a frame-by-frame animation narrated by myself, a drag-and-drop Venn diagram builder, and a drawing application for users to create their own diagrams. The application, including all the characters, narration, and text, were created as part of the course requirements for Animate Arts (taught by Ian Horswill, Marlena Novak, and Jay Alan Yim) and The Design of Technological Tools for Thinking and Learning (taught by Uri Wilensky) at Northwestern University.
Research and design consulting
Research and design consulting
World of Viruses (WoV) (2007-2010)As a research collaborator on this SEPA-funded project, I conducted in-depth clinical interviews with teenaged readers of a custom-written/illustrated comic book series on virology. I also served as consultant on the design of the World of Viruses Comic Viewer: A collection of iPad games, activities, and graphic stories for learning about virology.
Biomedical visualization
Biomedical visualization
Selected projects completed during my Masters degree in Biomedical Communications at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College.
The Plastic Brain (2004)
A 3D computer animation created for my Masters degree in Biomedical Communications, that visualizes cortical plasticity of the brain during motor skills learning.
A medical legal interactive visualization of brain injuries (2003)
A medical legal visualization assignment done in 2003 while a graduate student in Biomedical Communications at the University of Toronto. It presents an interactive interface for jury members to understand the brain injuries caused in an accident.
Lymphatic Filariasis (2003)
A 3D computer animation created for a course project while a student in Biomedical Communications.
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