For my capstone project, I began by undergoing the design thinking process. I conducted dozens of empathy interviews, defined a problem and refined it many times, did continual ideation, built a handful of prototypes, tested them, and made improvement after improvement to the product according to feedback from industry professionals, professors, entrepreneurs, teachers, students and peers.

The product is called Quizeo.ai. To play, classes participate in quizzes as teams, competing against other classes from around the world. To play, only a single device is needed for an entire class, eliminating the need for distracting devices. Utilizing computer vision technology, students answer questions via hand gestures, white boards, movement, and other interesting means. Teachers can either choose from standardized quizzes aligned to educational standards or make their own custom quizzes in tandem with generative AI.

Flow Immersive

In Spring quarter, I worked as an instructional designer for a company called Flow Immersive. It is a company that develops software to create interactive data visualizations in XR. The mission of the company is to help the world better communicate with data. As an intern, I was tasked to ideate various use cases of the platform within a classroom scenario and prototype sample lessons that will potentially be piloted in a classroom. For the lesson, the main resource to learn from was built by myself using the Flow Editor. I used the software to build data visualizations that communicate data using scaffolding to help the students get solid grasp of the data. Additionally, I found a clever way to utilize the Flow editor to create multiple choice questions which give the student immediate feedback as to whether they have interpreted the data correctly.

In this internship, I learned more about XR – its strengths and weaknesses. I have a much clearer picture of potential use cases for XR within an educational context and the limitations and issues that XR still poses for widespread use within classrooms.

Not only did I learn more about XR, but I also gained more knowledge about how to represent data in compelling and informative ways. I spent lots of time exploring data visualizations that are already present on the platform, noting their strengths and weaknesses. With a better understanding of the types of data visualizations that are possible, it has spurred my creativity to innovate new ways to communicate data effectively.

This internship has increased my levels of curiosity and interest in XR. I am excited to closely follow the development of the XR space so I can develop my own XR experiences for an educational context. In fact, I intend to find an online course so that I can begin developing for the XR space. While I do not image headsets being used at scale in the classroom within the near future, I do see strong use cases for it in workshops, at museums, or on field trips. These are some areas I am interested in developing for.

Magic Loops

During my summer internship, I worked as a Software Engineer and Learning Experience Designer at Magic Loops, an AI startup. Magic Loops is a powerful tool that enables both programmers and non-technical users to create fully functional applications that run live in just moments.

While I have a strong technical background and have previously led technical teams in product development, this is my first role with the official title of Software Engineer. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience. I've had the opportunity to collaborate closely with a team of engineers to write and deploy features, broaden my technological expertise by working with Next.js and Tailwind, and deepen my understanding of setting up scalable codebase architecture.

At Magic Loops, I also did work as a Learning Experience Designer. In this role, I worked to help improve the user experience. The main project I worked on in this role was creating a dictionary of jargon that is used within the tool to help non-technical people understand how to better use the tool.

In my next role, I'm eager to take on a more generalist position at a startup, encompassing design, programming, and business strategy. My internship at Magic Loops has been instrumental in helping me build the skills and expertise needed to excel in this multifaceted role.