The Undergraduate Program and the Teaching and Learning Collaboratory have awarded seed grants to four teams testing new pedagogical approaches or technologies that will impact student learning. The purpose of a seed grant is to develop a project to the point that it is competitive for external funding. 

The winning proposals are:

“Systematizing Gameful Learning Strategies: Extending the Scope of Gameful Learning Initiative Pilots and Research and Codifying Gameful Learning Professional Development”

Gameful learning focuses on using the principles of game design to increase motivation, engagement, and joy of students in the learning process. The project goals are to increase the number of pilot studies and associated research initiatives, and to expand efforts to systematize the strategies of gameful learning.

Team members: Christopher Jeansonne; Nicholas Mizer; Victoria Bennett, Michael Hughes, and Brian Clark.

“Expanding the Frontier of RPI’s Immersive and Embodied Learning Initiative”

This project builds on RPI’s unique experience with panorama screen environments at EMPAC and in the CRAIVE-Lab. At the same time, it focuses on overcoming the hurdles of developing class material and methods to create material rapidly for these classes.

Team members: Jonas Braasch, Carla Leitao, Emily Liu, Rhett Russo, Mei Si, Amy Svirsky, Eyosias Ashenafi, Alex Ma, Dennis Shelden, Jillian Willis, and Helen Zhou

“Building Capacity for Innovations in Community Engaged Learning at Rensselaer”

This project aims to activate the potential of mutually beneficial connections between RPI students and the broader community by piloting and assessing pedagogical innovations in community-engaged learning. The team proposes developing a course on community engagement that can be adapted to multiple disciplines and taught by faculty or teams of faculty across departments at RPI.

Team members: Jen Cardinal, Guy Schaffer, Chris Tozzi, and Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn.

“Teaching and Learning in the Metaverse and the CAVE”

Immersive virtual reality (VR) has a long history of interest and experimentation in education. VR offers broad potential in teaching and learning, including the sense of presence, capacity for visualization, constructivist approaches to learning, motivation and engagement, collaboration, and spatial reasoning. This project will address how to best formulate the building blocks and vocabulary of teaching with metaverse technologies, and how to archive, preserve, maintain, and re-present the history of work in this area.

Team members: Ben Chang, Silvia Ruzanka, and Matthew Gantt.