UCLIC Research Seminar Series

Education technologies are often posited as solutions for closing early literacy and STEM gaps for students with limited access to quality formal education. Some technologies have shown success as educational interventions; however, many others fail as they do not account for the culture and deployment context of their target demographic. In this talk, I will describe my work in the last 6 years designing culturally responsive education technologies to supplement formal education for and with underserved students in the United States and in rural villages in Tanzania. I will show evidence that designing education technologies in culturally responsive ways leads to better system engagement and learning outcomes for students. This work has led to an early literacy system used by over 2000 students without access to formal education in Tanzania, a tablet-based intervention that fosters peer-peer tutoring in the absence of knowledgeable adults, and programmable video games that improve students computational thinking while prioritizing their culture and gaming preferences.

Judith, O, Uchidiuno, Kenneth, R, Koedinger, Jessica, Hammer, and Amy,E, Ogan. 2021. Fostering Equitable Help-Seeking for K-3 Students in LowIncome and Rural Contexts. InCHI Conference on Human Factors in Com-puting Systems (CHI '21), May 08-13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan.ACM, NewYork, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445144

Judith Uchidiuno, Ken Koedinger, and Amy Ogan. "Teacher Perspectives on Peer-Peer Collaboration and Education Technologies in Rural Tanzanian Classrooms." ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471939