Eda's Portfolio

Eda (Ruting) Zhang

Hi there! My name is Eda (pronounced as [ed-ah]) (汝婷). I am a PhD candidate at Design, Informal, Creative Education (DICE), University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am a researcher and a designer. My goal is to create more diversified, more inclusive, and playful learning environments for people from all backgrounds. In my research, I investigate how people learn with, through, and about interactive artifacts (artefacts). I design tools to understand, support and facilitate people’s learning, collaboration, and creativity using research methods including design-based research, mixed method and data mining/ai.

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Game Related Research

CS Education & Makerspace

Miscellaneous

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eda.zhang@wisc.edu

Women and underrepresented racial minority students are marginalized in STEM contexts. The anxiety and burden that come with marginalization first appear in adolescence and can contribute to long-term disengagement. In the SCIPR project, we design transformational games for middle-school aged students who are marginalized in STEM. The games encourage and foster curiosity, as a type of STEM skill to increase comfort and competency in STEM spaces. This project has contributions in game design methodology, playtesting methods for marginalized children, curiosity and uncertainty theory, and has produced award-winning games.

To, A., Fan, A., Kildunne, C., Zhang, E., Kaufman, G., & Hammer, J. (2016, October). Treehouse Dreams: A Game-Based Method for Eliciting Interview Data from Children. In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (pp. 307-314).
To, A., Fath, E., Zhang, E., Ali, S., Kildunne, C., Fan, A., ... & Kaufman, G. (2016). Tandem Transformational Game Design: A Game Design Process Case Study. In Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on Meaningful Play.
To, A., Holmes, J., Fath, E., Zhang, E., Kaufman, G., & Hammer, J. (2018). Modeling and designing for key elements of curiosity: Risking failure, valuing questions. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 4(2).

Science museums often reward visitors who have already engaged with the traditional modes of science learning. However, this dynamic only pushes people from underrepresented communities farther away from the learning opportunities. Rainbow Agents was designed to encourage and promote computational literacy through collaborative play and share sense-making. In our research , we bring in and focus on perspectives from groups typically underrepresented in computer sciences to help further understand how to better design and engage a broader group of audience in informal learning environments.

Zhang, E., Kumar, V. (2019). Designing Collaborative Museum Games for Engaging Computational Thinking Practices. Presented as a poster at the Learning Sciences Graduate Student Conference (LSGSC) 2019. Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA. (Poster Presentation)
Pellicone, A., Lyons, L., Kumar, V., Zhang, E., & Berland, M. (2019, October). Rainbow Agents: A Collaborative Game For Computational Literacy. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (pp. 597-604).

Selvaraj, A., Zhang, E., Porter, L., & Soosai Raj, A. G. (2021, June). Live Coding: A Review of Literature. In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 164-170)..
Raj, A. G. S., Gu, P., Zhang, E., Williams, J., Halverson, R., & Patel, J. M. (2020, February). Live-coding vs Static Code Examples: Which is better with respect to Student Learning and Cognitive Load?. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Australasian Computing Education Conference (pp. 152-159).
Soosai Raj, A. G., Zhang, E., Mukherjee, S., Williams, J., Halverson, R., & Patel, J. M. (2019, July). Effect of native language on student learning and classroom interaction in an operating systems course. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (pp. 499-505).
Raj, A. G. S., Zhang, H., Abhyankar, V., Mukerjee, S., Zhang, E., Williams, J., ... & Patel, J. M. (2019, November). Impact of bilingual cs education on student learning and engagement in a data structures course. In Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (pp. 1-10).