Interdisciplinary Innovation
IDeATe inspires senior Daphne Han to combine biomedical research and learning design
By Sarah Elizabeth Bender
School of Computer Science senior Daphne Han is just weeks away from graduating with a degree in computational biology. But despite her technical knowledge and competitive experience, her ultimate goal isn’t to attend medical school or become singularly focused on research in a lab.
Instead, Han was inspired by her Design for Learning minor through the Integrative Design, Arts, and Technology network (IDeATe). She wants to use her scientific expertise to make biomedical research more accessible to the public, championing science communication to help people understand important information about medicine and healthcare.
“As far back as high school, I remember noticing students who were really curious people, but didn’t learn well in a class setting with textbooks and lectures,” Han recalled. “My classmates and even my siblings absorbed information differently from me, and that stayed with me. I realized I wanted to explore how to better design educational experiences to personalize learning for different groups of people.”
Forging a Path
Han didn’t initially know about IDeATe when she came to CMU. She chose the school because it was one of the few that offered an undergraduate degree in computational biology and because of the way it leveraged computer science as a tool to enhance research. Still, she wanted to pursue an additional area to complement her major — and she wanted to find ways to incorporate her longtime interest in education in her future research career.
“In high school, I did a lot of education work — I started a math camp for middle school students, and designed the curriculum and activities,” she said. “When I found the Design for Learning minor, I knew it was a way to tie these two areas together.”
She’s found plenty of encouragement within the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department. Han’s advisor, Associate Teaching Professor and Undergraduate Program Director Phillip Compeau, has inspired her to think about different ways she can pair education with a research career. He co-founded CMU’s Pre-College Program in Computational Biology and has helped develop numerous open online education projects, including Bioinformatics Specialization, Biological Modeling and Programming for Lovers.
“The computational biology faculty and my advisor have always been supportive of whatever I chose to do,” Han said. “In general, my experiences with the faculty in both my major and minor have pushed me to think more deeply about accessibility in education.”
Hands-On Experience
Through several IDeATe classes, Han found firsthand opportunities to put her learning design skills to the test. In Learning Media Design, Han and a small team of students from across CMU worked with an art teacher at a local high school to make the critique process more rewarding for students.
“Art is different from other subjects, where you get graded based on objective criteria,” Han explained. “Students in this class were getting discouraged when their work was critiqued — they tied their projects to their self worth, and so feedback affected them really personally. It was an interesting problem to think about how to help them enjoy the critique process more.”
Han’s team created an app where students could document their work by uploading each project to an archive where they could watch their skills grow over time. Classmates could tap a specific part of a piece to provide feedback about that aspect — commenting on values, contrast, shadows and more. The app even included a glossary of terms to help encourage more constructive critiques.
IDeATe Integration
A key part of the IDeATe experience is the chance to engage with students from different disciplines, and Han values that opportunity as a way to expand her perspective.
“I think that innovation is going to happen much more rapidly when people with different ideas, backgrounds or skill sets come together,” she said. “When considering different opportunities, one thing I look for is a community where people have these different skill sets and backgrounds. I want to broaden not just my perspective on my field, but my perspectives on life — it’s something that I really value.”
She’s also using her minor as a chance to think about how to expand the perspectives of others. For example, nonscientists may not immediately understand the value of her work. How would she explain her research to her parents? To an Uber driver?
“In recent years, we’ve seen how important it is to be able to share key information about medicine and healthcare in an accessible way,” Han said. “The research you do is important, but it’s even more important to be able to communicate what you’re working on to the general public. My training in both computational biology and IDeATe have positioned me to make complex scientific ideas and concepts accessible through different mediums.”
This semester, Han is enrolled in Learning in Museums, which challenges students to design a pop-up exhibition for the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh focused on an aspect of socioemotional learning. Han’s group is exploring listening, investigating ways to foster social awareness and relationship skills by encouraging two-way communication between a parent and a child.
Together, the team came up with a plan to capture participants’ conversations and give them the opportunity to reflect and share with the help of a microphone borrowed from the IDeATe Lending Collection. Then they put the prototype to the test with real children and parents — first during Spring Carnival, then with museum visitors at the end of the semester.