We have explored designers having empathy for the audience of focus, designers using empathy as a means to an end, and designers using empathy to deliver a meaningful design deliverable. Our research has evolved from studying how designers reflect on their own design context and the audience's given circumstance to designers acting on moments of…

This study investigates the impact of gamified project-based learning (GPBL) on the learning motivation of elementary students in rural China and investigates how they perceive GPBL. Using GPBL as an intervention, this study adopts a descriptive qualitative research design, where observation notes, interviews, and focus groups triangulate to…

The shift from traditional education to maker-centered learning calls for an analysis and evaluation of the current studies on professional development in maker-centered learning. The current systematic literature review was conducted to examine existing literature on teacher professional development for maker-centered learning. It aligns the…

This article presents a collaborative maker project integrating the arts in a synchronous online environment. Based on the Thinkering, Making, Sharing, and Reflecting (TMSR) model, the four components of hands-on, minds-on, hearts-on, and social-on learning were integrated into an online collaborative maker project involving arts, music, and…

Recent technological, cultural and economic factors have shifted the balance between recalling and reconstructing internalised information and accessing externalised information. While digital artefacts constitute an enormous and valuable set of resources, human engagement and reflection are important to the meaningful synthesis and application of…

This study investigated the effects of precommitment on college students' goal setting and academic performance, and students' attitude towards precommitment-related activities. Precommitment refers to a procedure in which students set up learning goals, possibly with a time limit at the beginning of a learning phase, then report the comparison…

This paper describes the design, implementation, and results of an NSF funded Summer Academy from 2016 to 2018, which engaged, on an annual basis, 30 to 60 rising 10th and 11th grade high school science students in an innovative, technology-enriched Project Based Learning (PBL) environment. This Academy emphasized how tech gadgets work and the…

The following paper describes a distinctive collaborative service-learning project done in an undergraduate class on web design. In this project, students in a web design class contacted local community non-profit organizations to create websites (collections of web pages) to benefit these organizations. The two phases of creating a website,…

The focus of this paper is a case study of a Texas-based school that implemented global projects to connect their students with many states and countries as a platform for integrating collaboration and communication skills, technology tools, and cultural diversity into an existing curriculum. The school introduced videoconferencing at every grade…