CREATE Lab (directed by Jan Plass) continues to lead interdisciplinary research at the intersection of learning sciences, games, immersive media, and personalized AI.

Teams made significant progress across a wide portfolio:

• Learning Game Design Patterns and Emotional Design for Learning

• Generative AI for personalized learning support

• VR simulations for biology, astronomy, and public-health education

• STEMXR for Equity, leveraging AI and multimodal sensing

• Digital play and wellbeing studies with children ages 8–12

• Project HOPE, providing cognitive, mental-health, and coding interventions for Syrian refugee youth

The lab also expanded the DREAM platform, offering access to research-based educational games and simulations. CREATE continues to host a wide range of research and development opportunities for students.

This year, RIDDLE (directed by Camillia Matuk) advances multiple initiatives exploring how AI and interactive media can deepen students’ research and data literacies.

StudyCrafter continues to evolve as an AI-supported platform where learners design human-behavior experiments through interactive stories. The team expanded AI feedback features, built curricular materials, and analyzed student-generated artifacts from university and youth programs.

With Critical Data Stories, researchers partnered with teachers and teens to design tools that support data storytelling and social-issue inquiry. Recent studies examined how youth remix data on platforms like TikTok and how educators approach data storytelling in classrooms.

Through MindHive and You:Quantified, the lab facilitated community-science projects with high school classes, building tools for multimodal data visualization and fostering ethical reasoning in human-subject research. The teams conducted classroom studies, teacher interviews, and multiple rounds of curriculum refinement.

Finally, the Dynamic Data Visualizations project broadened foundational understanding of how people perceive animated data. Interviews with designers and experiments with viewers are informing best-practice design guidelines.

ECT student Sanjana Vinjamuri reports on the work happening in RIDDLE to uncover how students navigate research design, feedback, and data storytelling with technology. Learn More>>>

This year, the AUGMENT-ED Lab (directed by Xavier Ochoa) continues to expand its work at the intersection of AI, learning sciences, and multimodal interaction, with several exciting project updates and new directions.

One major focus is the continued development of OPAF v.2 (AI-Augmented Oral Presentation Deliberate Practice), an enhanced version of the lab’s AI-supported presentation training system designed to provide scalable, structured feedback for students’ communication skills.

The lab is also advancing the Theory-Measurement-Evaluation (TME) framework to provide automated ways to build explainable learner models (think estimating the learner's mental, emotional and motivational states) that can help provide actionable feedback and personalized scaffolding.

In STEM education, STEMXR4E integrates AI and multimodal sensing technologies to improve engagement and equity in immersive STEM learning environments where teachers become the architects of advanced learning experiences without needing to know about the complexities of those technologies.

Finally, the lab continues to refine Auggie, a pedagogically grounded LLM-based agent designed to bring voice and embodied interaction into AI learning tools.

Together, these projects reflect AUGMENT-ED’s growing commitment to designing AI systems that responsibly and effectively enhance the acquisition and development of 21st century skills.