Some select projects I’ve worked on over the years:

Swift Playgrounds

Swift Playgrounds is an educational iPad app that teaches beginners to code. I created content and curriculum for Swift Playgrounds, along with other educational initiatives, while working both individually and leading teams at Apple. I also set up and ran an international user research program to improve product quality and worked with design and engineering to inform product direction. I additionally oversaw the localization and release of the Swift Playgrounds content into 16 languages, reaching over 1 million users around the world.

Zydeco

The Zydeco Project (2010-2015) investigated how to support students as they engage in science inquiry activities across formal and informal environments (e.g. classrooms and museums) using mobile technologies. Zydeco enabled teachers and students to create science investigations by defining goals, questions, and labels in order to annotate, organize, and reflect on multimodal data (e.g., photos, videos, audio, text). These data can be collected in any environment, such as museums, parks, or at home, and is stored in the cloud. This enabled students and teachers to access the annotated information later through the Zydeco website or iPad application, which supports the building of scientific explanations addressing the questions they are investigating.

I was the lead developer and researcher on Zydeco and also conducted numerous field studies with classes of students (ages 10-17) from a variety of school districts visiting different informal environments. These trials involved more than 1,000 students visiting museums, such as The Henry Ford Museum, The Field Museum, the Michigan Science Center, and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, as well as parks and wildlife preserves. Zydeco is available as a free download on the App Store, and has been used by educators and establishments nationwide.

This project was funded by Grant Opportunities [Collaborative Spaces] through the University of Michigan Digital Media Commons and by NSF Grant No. DRL-102002.

Colibri

Colibri was an iOS application designed to help you rapidly build German vocabulary knowledge. The application used spaced repetition to optimize learning speed and provides analytics of your progress over time.

Colibri differed from other vocabulary learning software in that professionally curated word sets with example sentences can be bought for varying skill levels that are linked to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. Colibri also included important contextual information, including verb forms and noun articles/plurals, and color-codes nouns by gender as a memory aid.