a team of undergraduates, she headlined a project to develop a unique computer science curriculum for middle school students. She then earned her M.A. in mathematics education at Columbia University. Afterwards, she taught in the Chicago Public School system at Orr Academy High School (an AUSL school) for two years. Currently, Golnaz is working with the Epistemic Games Research Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she has led the efforts on engineering virtual internship simulations for high school and first year undergraduate students. Golnaz's current research is focused on how games and simulations increase student engagement in STEM fields, how players learn engineering design in real-world and virtual professional environments, and how to assess engineering design thinking.
Mr. Zachari Lucius Swiecki, University of Wisconsin, MadisonGraduate student in educational psychology, learning sciences area.Prof. Naomi C. Chesler, University of Wisconsin, Madison Naomi C. Chesler is Professor of Biomedical Engineering with an affiliate appointment in Educational Psychology. Her research interests include vascular biomechanics, hemodynamics and cardiac function as well as the factors that motivate students to pursue and persist in engineering careers, with a focus on women and under-represented minorities.
Assessing the Effectiveness of Shah's Innovation Metrics for Measuring Innovative Design within a Virtual Design Space AbstractEpistemic games, such as the virtual engineering internship Nephrotex, allow students to explore creative ways to approaching engineering problems while providing a novel alternative to the direct transmission method of instruction. Within Nephrotex, students choose a polymer, manufacturing process, surfactant, and percentage of carbon nanotube to create a functioning kidney dialysis membrane prototype. The performance of the membrane is measured using cost, flux, blood cell reactivity, marketability, and reliability thresholds given by stakeholders within the fictitious company. Although Nephrotex has been shown to be a valuable educational tool for modeling the product design process, only limited work has been done to investigate whether it is capable of providing an environment that allows students to generate innovative designs.The innovation assessment framework of Shah and colleagues employs four metrics of innovation -novelty, variety, quality, and quantity; novelty is further divided into a priori and a posteriori metrics. This work found that a priori and a posteriori novelty, variety, and quality were applicable metrics of innovation in the epistemic game environment of Nephrotex. Literature ranges for a priori and a posteriori novelty scores aligned with those found in this study.Comparing prior work on Nephrotex that identified innovative student designs based on a proposed literature definition, it was found that the Shah metrics between the innovative and non-innovative groups showed little variation and no statistically significant differences. A t test and a ...
