Martina Rau, HCII (Advisor: Vincent Aleven)
2nd yr PIER (associate) and HCII
Martina first came to CMU to do a research internship during the summer 2007. At this time, she was still working on her Diploma in Psychology in Freiburg, Germany. Back in Freiburg, she had been focusing on educational psychology and cognitive science as part of her studies. In addition to that, she was also working as a research assistant on projects with intelligent tutoring systems in the domains of chemistry and algebra. Thanks to the existing collaboration between her Freiburg’s research group and the PSLC community in Pittsburgh, it was easy for Martina to extend her internship for several months so that she could conduct her research for her Diploma thesis in Pittsburgh. In this work, Martina focused on learning with multiple graphical representations in the domain of fractions and she will pursue this line of research further in order to gain insights in how learners abstract concepts from experience with multifold instances. Martina considers herself as a very predictable person apart from one exception: she sometimes drinks beer although she doesn’t really like it much.