We are a group of faculty members at Purdue that are at the forefront of convergent science. We have joined together to share our interests, expertise, specialized equipment, and resources to promote collaborations.
Our mission statement is:
To generate new knowledge about how students and professionals develop affective, behavioral and cognitive engagement and learning in technology mediated STEM environments, and to create and appropriate technology-based solutions that enable learners to express themselves through making, programming, experimenting, constructing, and inventing.
The cyberlearning research facility:
Is a laboratory classroom currently located in HEAV 129 has been equipped with 30 laptops and 30 haptic devices. It is envisioned that the facility will be equipped with other technology to capture parallel sources of multimodal data such as eye tracking devices, video cameras, line of motion sensing input device, sensors and so forth. The facility has been designed for conducting large-scale experiments with human subjects, implementation of laboratory assignments in higher education, and deployment of outreach programs at the K-12 level. It is envisioned that faculty participants will combine or share their own equipment.
Advisory board members:
The consortium is currently advised by two nationally and internationally recognized experts. Dr. Janet Kolodner (external advisor) and Dr. Karthik Ramani (internal advisor).
Janet L. Kolodner is a cognitive scientist and learning scientist and a retired Regents' Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was Founding Editor in Chief of The Journal of the Learning Sciences and served in that role for 18 years. She was Founding Executive Officer of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). From August, 2010 through July, 2014, she was a program officer at the National Science Foundation and headed up the Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program (originally called Cyberlearning: Transforming Education). Since finishing at NSF, she is working toward a set of projects that will integrate learning technologies coherently to support disciplinary and everyday learning, support project-based pedagogy that works, and connect to the best in curriculum for active learning.
Karthik Ramani is a Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University. He serves in the editorial board of Elsevier Journal of Computer-Aided Design. His research lab, C Design Lab, represents its focus in the gelatinous space at the intersection of design, art and science of geometric computing, and engineering. While his research lies at the intersection of mechanical engineering and information science and technology, the areas span design and manufacturing, new kernels for shape understanding using machine learning, geometric computing and human-computer natural user interaction and interfaces with shapes and sketches. A major area of emphasis in his group are computer support for early design, shape searching, sketch-based design, cyber and design learning, sustainable design, and natural user interfaces for shape modeling. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, over 90 Journal publications; over 70 invited presentations, and granted 10 patents.