HP Campus of the Future: 2022 Emerging Technology Grant Teaching & Learning Projects

Partnering with the Office of the Provost, HP and AMD, CUIT is enabling and supporting Columbia faculty, researchers, and administrators in developing next-generation applications in their respective areas of expertise.

LBA

Lola Ben-Alon - Assistant Professor of Architecture Technology, Director of Natural Materials Lab, Director of Building Science & Technology Sequence at Columbia GSAPP

This project aims to develop novel and speculative modes of digital fabrication, additive manufacturing, and manual craft using a range of earth- and bio-based materials. Alongside theoretical and practical hands-on experiences, students will use computational and fabrication technologies to invent new kinds of construction flows and speculate about the roles of material flows, supply chains, and labor. Using the Natural Materials Lab space, this course will offer students multifarious opportunities to experience unmediated fabrication technologies using a range of textures, constituencies, and plasticities within earth construction techniques. As a final deliverable, students will iteratively develop new processes and artifacts while contributing to a broader interdisciplinary scope related to the automated construction, mechanical, thermal, and environmental impacts of natural and living material worlds.

Razan Hamed

Razan Hamed - Associate Professor of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine, Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

This project integrates Virtual Reality (VR) technology to enhance students' empathy and understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) components and professional skills in a new Occupational Therapy Master's program course. Occupational therapy educators are constantly encouraged to explore innovative teaching methods to promote deep learning. The immersive experience and interactive 3D components of VR can engage students in self-directed learning and allow for more profound reflections on DEI issues. Additionally, emerging technology-based instructional approach may be more appealing to the newer generation of learners, especially when teaching multifaceted and intricate concepts such as those of DEI.

Joss Jake

Joss Lake - Adjunct Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia School of the Arts

This project redesigns a speculative fiction masterclass in the School of the Arts MFA program using VR technology. In creative writing classrooms, there is often an assumption that writing independently and presenting written work orally are the best approaches. As a result, multiple modalities are not often incorporated into the classroom space. Through the integration of VR into the writing classroom space, writers will participate with avatars in a Spatial collaborative space, share their writing while in their created VR space, and work on a group VR experience based on speculative fiction. By allowing students to move between VR and writing, students are empowered to experiment with many ways of organizing and expressing their work: through visuals, audio, animation, and text. Using innovative tools such as VR to craft their worlds, writers will profoundly experience the effects of their creative acts and play with the elements of their invented spaces.

Jorge Otero Pailos

Jorge Otero-Pailos - Professor and Director of Historic Preservation, Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation

This project aims to transform preservation pedagogy by introducing 3D scans and related 21st century digital technologies into courses at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The project addresses the serious limitations of 2D images currently used in teaching and learning about architectural monuments. The introduction of 3D scans will facilitate students’ ability to visualize large architectural monuments, recognize decay patterns, and understand the long-term effects of gravity, climate and other social forces. This innovation promises to transform pedagogy in preservation, architectural history, and other related disciplines by providing tools to transition from 2D slide lectures to 3D interactive digital environments. We hypothesize that 3D scans will improve student learning by conveying the more realistic conditions that preservationists work on, enabling a student to virtually experience monuments from around the world, and compare the effects of different preservation cultures upon them.

Jaime Panton
Deanna Schneider

Assistant Professors of Columbia University School of Nursing

Jaime Panton and Deanna Schneider

This project brings innovation and new ways to design teaching and learning in nurse education through VR. The pandemic has highlighted how there are many creative ways to teach healthcare provider students how to assess, diagnose, and manage patients without being in a traditional classroom setting. Through the implementation of this project, nurse practitioner students who care for children will be exposed to emerging technology and engage with a high acuity patient scenario while allowing for the safety of managing care for a virtual pediatric patient. Additionally, transition to a VR versus in-person simulation will allow students the flexibility to complete the scenarios again for additional practice outside of the classroom time. The project has implications broadly across healthcare education, intending to bridge the gap in research exploring the impact of simulation in nurse practitioner education.

BS

Brent R. Stockwell - Professor of Biological Sciences and Chemistry, Columbia University Arts & Sciences

Building on insights from a previously performed study with support from the Emerging Technology Grant using VR to teach biochemistry, the new project will evaluate a new set of tools for teaching biochemistry in Augmented Reality (AR). The project hypothesizes that AR provides a technology that can improve student engagement in a small group learning environment by creating an immersive experience where attention is focused on the challenges of learning biochemistry through realistic 3D models. These 3D simulations illustrate key biochemical concepts in a way that is hard to explain using 2D tools in Zoom or textbooks and a whiteboard on campus. The implementation science model, RE-AIM, will be used to evaluate the implementation of AR technology.

 

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