172 - Julia Chatain: Embodied Learning and Educational Technology in Mathematics and Beyond (REAIR)

16:44Adani:And it's also not always easy to make that initial connection between researchers and practitioners or educators, right? Sometimes I think, especially in broader society, there's like this perception of researchers being siloed and thinking about things in their own little ivory tower, not really bothering actually to even talk to other people about how that could be applied in practice. Maybe it would also be great for us to talk a little bit about things that you've heard teachers be optimistic about. Is there anything where you felt like educators seem particularly excited to try or implement some of the things you've been working on in your research?

17:20Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah, I think generally when they try the technologies, they're very excited about it and they really can see how this is bridging a gap that they have in their practice, specifically Even mathematics, like having those concrete interactive examples are very important to them. And in some of our studies, we noticed that how during the lecture, actually, they ask for screenshots from the activity so they can then like explicitly connect their content to the game. And this we found quite interesting because they really understood how this helps. And then they were happy that they can use this to make their part of their work a bit easier.

17:53Dr. Julia Chatain:I think there's also, it's a bit, we also had some projects where we look at making grading a bit easier for the teachers. So that I provide a first assessment of the grading and these kinds of things that would reduce their workload and give them more time for some aspects that are more crucial or their expertise is more important. So I think those are some things that they're also excited about. And I think maybe there will be also a shift about what we do in the classroom and what we do at home. So maybe you would have more interactive components in the classroom and more passive activities at home.

18:22Dr. Julia Chatain:So that this might also be some things that some teachers may be excited about and some not so much. Right.

18:29Adani:Actually, I was just thinking, we talked about abstraction or like abstractness and concreteness earlier. Would you want to tell us about one of the games that you developed or one of the tasks that you developed? You talked about learning graph theory in the R. You also talked about like literally grasping derivatives. Yeah. Is there any one of these that you think you could share a bit about?

18:51Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah. I just need to put a disclaimer in there, but in mathematics education, there's a bit of a conflict on whether we think that concreteness is helpful or not, because some people are worried that if we start with concrete examples, then people can't abstract anymore. And we have some work looking into this where we discuss what aspects of concreteness are helpful. Is it because it's specific? Is it because it's familiar? Is it because it's interactive and et cetera? So just putting this disclaimer out there. And in the examples we looked into for the graph theory topic, We were trying to find something more familiar and relatable that students could play with before going into the more formal and abstract representations.

19:29Dr. Julia Chatain:And here we had a game in virtual reality where the graph, okay, I don't know how much people know about graph, but the graph was actually represented as a pipe network. And you have, it was in, based in Switzerland. So you had a lake in a mountain and you had to bring water from the lake to a city. And this is a situation that's very easy to understand. and then people could manipulate the pipe system in order to make the maximum amount of water flow from one end to the other, which is a famous mathematical problem. And this was quite touching because in the study afterwards, we found that the students found this a more relevant thing to learn, but they also felt better prepared for the lecture, which was using formal representations.

20:07Dr. Julia Chatain:So it gave them some sort of the right intuition to start grasping the more abstract versions. And more anecdotally, there were some students who came to me at the end and they said things like, Like, oh, I never thought I could do math and now I see I can actually do it. And that was quite touching as well. And then we had another project where it was more for high school students. And we just showed them two curves. It was like the function and the derivative, but we didn't tell them that. And then we said, okay, there's a special relationship between the two curves. Now you can manipulate them and explore this relationship.

20:38Dr. Julia Chatain:And then we build the levels a bit in a smart way so that the progression is like helping them making sense of the relationship between the two curves. And here as well, it was quite interesting for them because they get to interact with the math and make sense of it in a very, maybe easier way than when they have to manipulate formal symbols.

20:56Adani:Yeah, I actually remember I was, I think I was one of the pilot participants in the graph theory study and it was really cool. I've never taken a graph theory class and I probably still don't know much about it, but it actually helped me at least understand what edges and nodes are like very basic concepts. And that's really awesome. So part of what I'm really curious about is how do you even come up with your virtual setting or physical setting and like the tasks that you make students do? What is that idea generation process like for you?

21:25Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah. So it depends on the researchers. I like to have a really like user centered approach where I speak with the teachers. I speak with the students and I also read the literature on what is known about the aspects that they struggle with. and then we do several usually like paper-based prototype where we don't implement anything or like a very dirty implementation when we try it with the students and we see what sticks and what doesn't and once we have those very quick iterations then we can invest the time making the actual tool and then usually we try to also align it with the curriculum so we see what are the learning goals for the curriculum and then we decide on how to design the levels accordingly but it's a very iterative process and I think this helps because otherwise like you you spend a lot of time implementing an intervention and it just doesn't work with the students at the end.

22:11Dr. Julia Chatain:But we have to be mindful because again, for example, teachers are very busy. So we can't ask them for hours of interviews and testing when they already have a lot of things to do. So yeah, we need to do like them, see what has already been figured out before we start asking them questions.

22:26Adani:Right. And I mean, it also sounds like for most of these projects, there's a broader team of people with like different sets of background skills as well, where there's a lot of coordination. So you might have, I guess, like engineers, right? And more so people are more focused on the, maybe the front end of design end of things. And then people who are more so concerned with the educational aspects, I guess, what is, is there something that you particularly enjoy about these interdisciplinary collaborations? Because in some sense, it's hard to do, right? So there are many moving pieces, many people involved, and you also have maybe some communication gaps.

23:01Adani:So how do you think about that? What are some of the most enjoyable parts about this to you?

23:06Dr. Julia Chatain:I think you're touching on something really important here because, and that's the case for most interdisciplinary research, where often the core team is more from one field and then we sprinkle on top some aspects from another field. And it's very hard. For example, in the kinds of things we do, we need a strong background in learning sciences. We need a strong background in computer science. We need a strong background in interaction design, also artistic background. And you need this team and you need people to work well together. And so I think, I mean, here we were very lucky that everything works fine from the beginning because all the people we had in the team were a bit interdisciplinary.

23:40Dr. Julia Chatain:So like even the artists have also a bit of technical background. So it was really easy to speak with her and make her understand the technical aspects as well. One thing I really like is that, for example, the first time I worked with a designer, I remember the first designer I worked with, he always had a very different approach to the program. He was like always purely human centered. And back then I was only a scientist and I was like, okay, but how do I make things that are useful for humans? And he really had such a different perspective that it changed my perspective from focusing on technology to focusing on the human and the experience we want to create.

24:14Dr. Julia Chatain:And then how do we use technology to get there? And I think this was very interesting. And again, I think it's also because if you work in a more interdisciplinary team, like people have different backgrounds and you need to learn how to communicate with people who use a different language, not as in the spoken language, but like different vocabulary. And through this, that also makes you understand the problem a bit better. Like at the end, we have a shared understanding that's been informed by all of those perspectives. And that's very enriching, I think, as a researcher and as a person too.

24:43Adani:So interdisciplinarity sounds like a core theme across many of the things that you do. And one of the projects I hear you're now working on is sort of about learners building and extrapolating causal knowledge. and I would love to hear a little bit about what you're looking to investigate there. Is causal knowledge different from building knowledge about mathematics or in some of these other domains and where you hope to take things with that project?

25:09Dr. Julia Chatain:Yes, I think here it's a nice collaboration with a researcher called Liz Lapido and her expertise is on causal knowledge and how by experimenting with the world we make sense of the rules and then we learn about those rules and etc. And here we were thinking, what if we have a virtual reality world that is ruled by mathematical rules? So then just by experimenting with the world, you get to know about the underlying rules. So for example, let's say you have two sets. Let's imagine two bubbles. And then you know that the set A is inside of the set B. So if I want to manipulate with the sets in a causal world, then when I would try to stretch set A, I would not be able to stretch it out of set B.

25:52Dr. Julia Chatain:And I would experience that boundary and that mathematical rule just through the interaction. When in a non-causal world, I would still be able to stretch out the set outside of the set B, but it would tell me like, oh, now the rule is broken. So that's something we would want to look into. And as part of this project, we're also looking into generating those visual and interactive representation based on the formulas. So you can input a formula and it just generates the exercise automatically that answers to the mathematical rules. And this, again, this comes with this topic of scalability we've been working before, right?

26:24Dr. Julia Chatain:So you would not have to design each and single one of those activities.

26:28Adani:So what is required for it to do well in terms of generating these automatically? How does that work?

26:35Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah, so we are exploring different approaches here. There was one great paper called PenRules that looked at constraint-based programming, a way of programming that you give it a bunch of rules and then you can generate visuals accordingly. I will not go into detail because that might be too much. But we're also looking at AI-based approaches for these kinds of things.

26:54Adani:Wonderful. And so we've circled back on this a few times now already, but you've told us about a broad range of different projects that you have been working on or are still working on. And I think for as long as I've known you or as far as I know you, you've worked on a broad range of things since your college years. And one thing that I think would be really cool for people to hear about is actually how did you get started and how did you even become interested in those things? And what would you say maybe are some of the major influences and experiences along your path that brought you to this place?

27:24Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah, I think I have a bit of a less straightforward path. I remember when I was in high school, I was passionate about math and design. And then the school told me, you have to pick, so you should do math. I was like, okay. And then I studied mathematics, but I always felt there's a part of my interest that's not really being fulfilled. and I was also quite interested in education because I noticed again how mathematics was something I really loved and then people hated it I was like maybe there's something about how we teach mathematics that we could start looking into and then later on randomly I bumped into I did a research internship where we started looking at interaction and that's when I started working with designers and that brought this as okay I want to do math but also this and apparently it's possible and then when I moved I was a software engineer at ETH and then when I was there I started discussing with researchers about doing a PhD.

28:13Dr. Julia Chatain:And that's where I found about the learning sciences field. And then I was like, oh, perfect. I can do math and design for education. That's exactly what I've been looking for all these times. But I think from when I was younger, I didn't know that something like this would exist. And I didn't know it was possible to put all of those interests that I have together to do something meaningful. So that was quite an interesting process. Yeah. And I don't think it's specifically resources that inspired me. It's more like the people I met along the way. So like in this first internship, when I met with this designer and we spent hours trying to find a common language and he was very insightful and just learning about his perspective to problem solving was very interesting.

28:52Dr. Julia Chatain:And when I started the PhD, the program I was in, it was on learning sciences, but they hired only people who are not learning scientists. So I was a computer scientist, but you had a mathematician, a chemist, a physicist, et cetera. And we all try to make sense of learning sciences together. And here again, like looking at how they approach the frame, looking at how they think about it, that was also very inspiring. So, yeah, my inspiration is more like the people I met along the way.

29:17Adani:Yeah, I think, I mean, I very much resonate with that. I think I also feel very lucky that actually my first exposure to research ever was also the group that you were a doctoral student in and the professorship for learning sciences and higher education at ETH Zurich. And I also feel like that people really are a really large part of it. So part of what I wonder about is, is a lot of it luck or are there ways for people who are looking to get more involved in areas like these? Are there ways for them to be systematic about how they get exposed to some of these topics and can set a first foot into these areas?

29:55Adani:Do you think there's anything one can do or is it mostly just maybe you'll get lucky?

30:00Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah, there's always a luck component to everything, right? But I think it depends which age group we're talking about. But I think for me, I did quite a bit of internships and projects with different teams during my college years and even before. And I feel this is a very good way to figure out whether you like this kind of topic, you like this kind of approach to looking into problems and also whether you get along with the team. So I think picking those experiences carefully might be very, very important, I would say. Right. And again, for me, being from our interdisciplinary background, I always draw more towards, I don't think I'm an expert in one thing, but I am very interested in many things.

30:37Dr. Julia Chatain:And getting exposure here in all the things you're interested in is very important. So even if you're trained, like in my case as a mathematician, like spending some time working more on the design project or these kinds of things are very helpful for interdisciplinary research, I would say. And I think also spending time to talk with people who have a different background and really be open and humble about it. understand their perspective, even if it's so different from yours. Like I know in math, we are very strict about how we approach problem and looking at more like messy and blurry approaches as a bit confusing at first, but when you work with humans, they're also a bit messy and blurry sometimes.

31:12Dr. Julia Chatain:So it makes sense, right? So like staying open in those kinds of conversation, I think is quite important. Okay. I don't know if that's a systematic solution.

31:20Adani:I mean, sorry. It was also like a cheeky question, but I think it's a really wonderful answer actually i think i remember one of the first times ever we interacted i was also a little overwhelmed with feeling oh when you're in like an interdisciplinary setting do i have to know everything about all types of things what i'm garnering from your answer is partly you can start with one thing and then keep your mind open to exploring a range of experiences and you may want to be selective about them right but there's always room to do different things even if your school tells you to focus on math rather than design or something else right i mean it's also

31:55Dr. Julia Chatain:the jobs or the fields that will exist later on. For example, I feel the thing I'm working on right now is not even something we could imagine when I had to make the big decisions about what to study. And also, I think there's space for everything. There's space for someone who's really an expert in one thing and like the decades working on this and space for people who are a bit more interested in everything and then can connect all those experts together and do the translation between all of them. So I think it's okay to be either ends of that spectrum.

32:25Adani:Yeah. So now having collected all of these different experiences and actually having built a lot of different skills, I also wanted to ask, what are you most excited to work on in the future? I hear there's a big initiative that you just joined this year. Yeah. What do you want to share in terms of what you're doing now and what you hope to do in the coming years?

32:45Dr. Julia Chatain:So right now I'm in Singapore and we are building like a five years research program on, it's called Future Embodied Learning Technologies, so FELT, which is a little pun on feeling mathematics and other topics. And here we are really looking at leveraging AI to solve some of the scalability issues I was mentioning and also bringing embodied learning technologies at scale. And here it's quite interesting because the way we build the program is starting from some actual challenges that exist out there. So for example, students who struggle with math literacy, who struggle with language learning, we're also looking at some accessibility topics.

33:22Dr. Julia Chatain:And then we are building the program from this and like defining the research question based on actual problems that exist in the real world. And this I'm quite excited about. Personally, the topics that really drive me now are accessibility. So in two ways, it's like one is, can we use this research? we have from embodiment to solve some of the accessibility problems. So for example, can we, I don't know, design a VR tool with haptic feedback so that people who have visual impairments can explore data sets or something like this. But also, as we bring more like visual and interactive tools into the classroom, how do we make sure those are accessible to all learners?

33:57Dr. Julia Chatain:So this kind of thing. And I'm also interested a bit in the more artistic end of things. So whether we can leverage those kinds of technologies to also enable creativity and artistic expression, which is something I want to push more towards as well.

34:10Adani:Yeah, that's super cool. That's such a multifaceted way of moving forward. Awesome. We talked about this a little bit, but still, I want to ask for more junior listeners thinking, oh, this sounds super cool. I want to do work along those lines or learn more about this. Do you have any places to point them to or recommendations or words?

34:31Dr. Julia Chatain:So I think no matter what your background is, I would try to get into coding a bit. Now that we have large language models and etc., coding means anything. But if you have an idea, try to make little prototypes. But the core thing, right, the coding, the visuals, the interaction, try to think of all of those things. And I feel this will teach you a lot about how to design solutions. And I feel this is very beneficial. I feel some of my personal projects were more beneficial to what I'm actually doing for a job now than some of my classes at uni. So I would recommend having both of those things.

35:01Dr. Julia Chatain:And yeah, I think stay curious and follow your interest. It might be there's a clear path that you're supposed to follow, but actually you're also interested in that other thing and you want to take this other course that's a bit more further from what you're doing. And I think this is quite rich, actually. So I would recommend following your interest a bit more.

35:18Adani:And is there a place where people can go to learn more about you and where your work is going to go?

35:25Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah, there's my personal website where I try to show some of the projects we've been working on, which is juliachaton.com. I hope there's my name written somewhere.

35:34Adani:Yeah, we'll link it as well.

35:36Dr. Julia Chatain:The French is a bit strong. And then right now I'm working at the SEC, so the Singapore ETH Center. And I want to say again something about starting your own projects. There's so many resources on the internet, so many tutorials, so many brilliant people spend time making YouTube videos to explain how to do those things. So yeah, just Google it, I would say. but yeah, I think it's worth the time and it's going to help a lot.

35:59Adani:Wonderful. Yeah, I think this is a great note to end on. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast studio and for telling us about your exciting work and yeah, looking forward to seeing where all this goes.

36:09Dr. Julia Chatain:Yeah, thank you for having me and it was nice to chat again.

36:34Adani:Thank you so much for listening. I hope you had as much fun following this conversation as I had recording it. I first met Julia when I was a research intern at ETH Zurich in 2021, and I have learned and continue to learn a lot from her. So I'm really grateful that I got to do this episode with her many years later to discuss her intriguing interdisciplinary work and really unique journey through research. So thanks again to Julia for coming on and sharing all of that with us today. We would love to hear what you think of this episode or our podcast in general, or if you have any other suggestions for future guests or topics for the podcast.

37:12Adani:You can reach us at stanfordpsychpodcast at gmail.com. You can also connect with us on Twitter at stanfordpsychpod. Finally, if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or elsewhere so more people can find us. Thank you and hope to see you again next time.