Associate Professor, Dr. Maria Harrington is deeply honored and grateful to have received two awards offered by UCF Faculty Excellence. The first one is the Research Incentive Award (RIA) and the second one is the Teaching Incentive Program (TIP). Harrington stated that “both are highly competitive and are unique in that the faculty vote on the quality of research and teaching, so my peers evaluated my work.”
The UCF In-Unit Research Incentive Award (RIA) program recognizes outstanding research, scholarly, or creative activity that advances the body of knowledge in a particular field, including interdisciplinary research and collaborations. The Research Incentive award recognizes in-unit employee contributions to UCF’s key goal of achieving international prominence in research and creative activities. The UCF In-Unit Teaching Incentive Program (TIP) rewards teaching productivity and teaching excellence.
In an interview with Dr. Harrington, she discussed more details about the awards as well as her research that she has been working on that received the high honors.
What are the benefits of the awards?
“It is the recognition of my impact at UCF by the faculty by my peers, so that makes it very special to me. I am deeply grateful to receive these two honors.”
What does this recognition mean for faculty who earn these awards?
“Just simply, it is a confirmation by my community that the ideas I am trying to express in my research, and ideas I am trying to communicate to my students has value. That it is excellent and it has impact. These awards help me to believe that my creative work, which is a form of art and science that uses technology to express reality for education, is of value.”
What research were you working on to get the research award?
“My primary area of research and creative activity is in the design, development, and evaluation of immersive informal learning applications of natural environments.”
Why is this important?
“This is a multidisciplinary research program that exists at the intersection of human-computer interaction design, digital media and information science, and informal learning related to biology and ecology education. I have focused on informal learning in natural environments as a highly innovative approach to understanding human learning at a foundational, or evolutionary biological level, driven by intrinsic motivation. If we can understand that, then we can design better applications to support the public in learning about their world, through scientific communication with technology, and ultimately to support each individual in their search for self-actualization through knowledge. My research is transforming the way people perceive and understand the natural world mediated through a design practice that uses augmented and virtual reality technologies.
My creative and research activities fall into three interconnected themes: design, development, and evaluation.”
How long have you worked on it?
“I started this work back in 2000, when my PhD. dissertation committee in Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh asked me for a thesis topic and I had observed children learning in a real field trip to a wildflower reserve. At this time, there was a great deal of interest in using game engines and developing virtual reality systems. I just combined the observations into a design to evaluate learning outcomes and I found a matrix of signals, emotions, actions, and learning that are all correlated and interconnected. Perfect for future research in Artificial Intelligence.”
Dr. Harrington also provided more details about the RIA and TIP applications that she submitted. These include her teaching philosophy and primary area of research and creative activity. Read more about it below!
RE TIP Application – Teaching philosophy
Teaching and Learning Philosophy Statement (3000 characters)
- Design as problem solving and co-creativity
My teaching philosophy is framed by taking every opportunity to create environments to encourage active and responsible learning, deliberate and intentional design choices, and creative original solutions from my students. Design in digital media is where each student learns to understand the full matrix of constraints and opportunities of a multidimensional and dynamic context required to correctly frame the problem. At best, the learning experience integrates multiple perspectives of users and stakeholders, market constraints and opportunities, to make efficient use of resources, and creative use of technology, to solve problems with efficiency and elegance with respect to legal and ethical boundaries. My goal is to teach the design process as a form of extreme problem solving, model critical thinking that is creative and empathetic, and encourage rapid prototype iteration in a co-design process with user and stakeholder partnerships to facilitate joint decisions and consensus. Shifts in perception, ways of thinking and new confidence grows out of this learning process.
- Use project based learning and scaffold learning environment with incremental complexity and difficulty
My courses are design focused and project based. I incrementally introduce material related to semester-long projects in a scaffold learning environment. Undergraduate courses are more structured with weekly readings, case studies, lectures, quizzes, digital labs, and tutorials. Each assignment feeds into the next, building to a final project over the semester. Each student’s project is original, creative, and unique. To achieve these goals, I maintain a highly flexible and dynamic approach to providing detailed feedback on each assignment to support the emergent growth of each individual. The final projects are the result of this generalizable, iterative, creative problem solving process. This approach creates the opportunity for a student to demonstrate their ability to think critically, creatively, collaboratively, empathetically, and scientifically.
- Deep passion and love of what I do and wanting to share
My overarching goals as an educator are to teach, empower, and enlighten. I want to ensure that my students leave my classes with the knowledge and skills they need to help them understand a complex and dynamic world. Designing a product, an application, or a system, is a way of thinking about the sciences of the artificial. My goal as a teacher is to construct an environment where the students master the knowledge, the process, and the problem-solving techniques needed for any human-centered design situation or problem. I intentionally and deliberately create environments for high motivation, where students can achieve self-confidence and independence. Other goals are to help my students to develop good judgment from knowledge, trust in scientific methods, empathy of others, and understanding of what creative work will bring them and others joy, and how to build highly functional teams. Then anything imagined becomes possible.
RE RIA Application:
My primary area of research and creative activity is in the design, development, and evaluation of immersive informal learning applications of natural environments.
This is a multidisciplinary research program that exists at the intersection of human-computer interaction design, digital media and information science, and informal learning related to biology and ecology education. I have focused on informal learning in natural environments as a highly innovative approach to understanding human learning at a foundational, or evolutionary biological level, driven by intrinsic motivation. If we can understand that, then we can design better applications to support the public in learning about their world, through scientific communication with technology, and ultimately to support each individual in their search for self-actualization through knowledge. My research is transforming the way people perceive and understand the natural world mediated through a design practice that uses augmented and virtual reality technologies.
My creative and research activities fall into three interconnected themes: design, development, and evaluation.
Design of digital media applications: I use a highly collaborative multidisciplinary co-design approach to incrementally discover the application design requirements. It is an organic process that extends the user-centered design process (e.g. typically in computer science or design departments) to build and test with end-users and stakeholders until a solution emerges from multiple iterations.
Development of digital media applications as immersive-embodied digital twins of nature: Constructing photorealistic data visualizations of natural environments (e.g. Digital Twins of nature).
Evaluation of digital media applications for learning outcomes: Once created, the application design is evaluated using experimental research, making use of mixed-methods research design, qualitative and quantitative methods, in IRB-approved studies to measure impacts on the emotional, behavioral, and learning outcomes of the users (e.g. learners).
A paper that summarizes Dr. Harrington’s work:
- Harrington, Maria, C. R. (March 13, 2023). Virtual Nature Makes Knowledge Beautiful. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 4. Sec. Virtual Reality and Human Behaviour. doi: 10.3389/frvir.2023.1100540, URL = https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frvir.2023. 1100540
Written by Majdulina Hamed.
Published to Nicholson News on October 2nd, 2024.
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