Technology and Innovation by Design gave me an opportunity to explore a broad range of interests in the history of technology, education, and the intersection of the two.
In my mid-semester project, I explored the history of a historical technology, the sewing machine, in order to better understand how technologies developed and diffused overtime. The sewing machine is a particularly interesting use-case as the modern sewing machine developed as the result of a network of innovations occurring overtime, with new innovators taking advantage of previous technology, and building upon its weaknesses.
In my final capstone project, I learned a new educational technology, Storyboard, to develop a Choose Your Own Adventure game. This game analyzed and compared gamification and games-based learning as the user role-played as a professor, designing their curriculum for the semester. The user controlled the narrative by making choices that determined how they would implement elements of gamification or games-based learning in their course. This project sparked my excitement in the field of educational game design and development, and led to the development of several other games-based projects during my program.
