Matt Easterday, HCII, (Advisor, Richard Scheines) 
6th yr PIER*-6th year HCII
While Matt Easterday often claims to be a robotics student, in real life he is  a dedicated practitioner of Human Computer Interaction, especially as applied to education, critical thinking and activism.
Prior 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.
Matt believes that the most serious problems facing society, such as global warming, nuclear proliferation, and poverty, are political, and thus cannot be solved without an active engaged citizenry.  Matt's goal is to develop scientifically-supported curricula to train effective citizens.  His work has shown that (a) students have difficulty synthesizing evidence about policy, (b) causal diagrams can be used to teach students how to make evidence-based policy recommendations and (c) perhaps by embedding intelligent cognitive tutoring software into educational games, we may be able to design instruction that both teaches students how to argue and is fun to play.
Matt partially 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, as well as through generous support from the Institute for Educational Sciences.
Matt's life-long goal is to develop the learning lab that will teach students the skills of the informed, democratic citizen.