Matt Easterday, HCII , (Advisor, Richard Scheines, Vincent Aleven)

Bio:
While Matt Easterday often claims to be a robotics student, in real life he is actually a dedicated practitioner of Human Computer Interaction, especially as applied to education, critical thinking and activism.

Previous to starting his PhD at Carnegie Mellon, Matt worked in Peace Corps Mongolia, where he initiated a national network of after-school clubs to teach "Life Skills," and his book of lesson plans on critical thinking and debate is now being adopted by the Mongolian Ministry of Education. At the local level, he taught Computers and English at a Mongolian secondary school and helped start the school's small dairy business.

More recently, he's applied his HCI skills to the redesign of CMU's Technology Consulting in the Community class that leads computer science undergraduate students through a semester-long technology consultation with Pittsburgh-area non-profits. He's also built a networked game for teaching Systems Thinking and designed a wearable computer system and process for allowing informed political discussion at outdoor protest rallies. Matt funds his learning addiction by developing the “Causality Lab” software used to teach causal and statistical learning to future social scientists at CMU and other quality learning zones across the country.

Matt's life-long goal is to develop the learning lab that will teach students the skills of the informed, democratic citizen.

Long term goals:
My long range goal to develop educational technology for education democratic citizens which includes analyzing politics and public policy and acting effectively on that information. I believe that educators can help students understand social systems and public policy by using diagrams to map causal systems and policy arguements and use diagrams to guide action. This strategy raises a number of interesting cognitive and education research questions including:
* How diagrams might support better critical thinking and inquiry
* Understanding the cognitive mechanisms involved in construction and interpretation of diagrams
* Building computer tools for instruction and analysis of social systems and policy