Transforming education with technology

Grant-funded projects enhance student learning through immersive, interactive experiences

From cracking down on fraud to exploring the cosmos, cutting-edge artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies are transforming education at the University of Georgia and giving students hands-on experiences that prepare them for the real world.

Each year, the Center for Teaching and Learning administers multiple learning technologies grants worth up to $25,000 to support the innovative use of technology in teaching and learning spaces. Among the many projects funded in the last few years are Choose Your Own Adventure, STEMin3D and Learning Bites — each finding unique ways to positively impact student success at UGA.

Uncovering fraud with AI

 

Tina Carpenter, Dan Smith Professor of Accounting and professor in the Terry College of Business, created Choose Your Own Adventure: AI-Powered Simulations for Active Learning. With support from a CTL learning technology grant, she collaborated with software company TrueUp to design an interactive AI simulation called “Trouble at Tindy” to help students learn about fraud detection.

The name “Tindy” combines her and her co-author’s name, Cindy Durtschi, and represents a global fashion company with fraud on their books that students need to uncover.

A culmination of more than 20 years of data, this AI learning platform is a “whodunnit” situation where students play undercover fraud investigators by posing as auditors. This prepares students to advance to the team game phase with significantly more knowledge of the difficult topics.

“The students’ reactions have been really awesome,” Carpenter said. “Both in the classroom and in their learning.”

The software became available last fall to business majors taking introductory accounting courses. Carpenter hopes the game can be expanded to reach more students and prepare them for an accounting major.

Expanding the universe in 3D

 

Franklin College of Arts and Sciences’ faculty members Nandana Weliweriya, lecturer, and Inseok Song, associate professor, created STEMin3D: Exploring Virtual Reality in Astronomy Education. With support from the grant, the faculty members bought the necessary software and hired undergraduate and graduate students to develop 3D models to simulate astronomical phenomena. These 3D models can be rendered via various immersive technologies including virtual and/or augmented realities. With the project, they aim to develop scientifically accurate, immersive, engaging, visually stunning, modular 3D simulation platforms and simulations to enhance students’ understanding of challenging astronomical concepts.

“When I go into a classroom, that’s my research lab. Everything students are doing is data for me,” Weliweriya said. “Yes, grades matter, but understanding is the most important thing.”

Both Weliweriya and Song have identified that many students struggle to visualize 3D concepts when learning from two-dimensional sources such as a textbook or video. For example, one of their projects is developing a celestial sphere platform, otherwise known as a virtual night sky. To create this, they use information from coordinate systems, actual images of the night sky, and behaviors of various solar system objects including planets, moons and other smaller bodies. This can then be controlled, and users can toggle parameters such as observation time, location, viewing direction and more.

While the program is still in the development phase, Weliweriya and Song are working on acquiring additional grants to hire full-time graduate students to develop more programs this summer. Their goal is to integrate these programs into their classes in fall 2025 to help students better conceptualize the material.

Ultimately, their hope is that this program can be used broadly at the elementary or middle school level to inspire the next generation of thinkers toward an astronomy or physics pathway.

“All those products will be released and shared to the open public,” Song said. “They can provide the same high-quality education to their students and that can be expanded, even to other countries.”

Improving veterinary education with AR

College of Veterinary Medicine faculty members Christopher Cleveland, Ania Majewska and Michael Yabsley created Learning Bites: Using Augmented Reality to Enhance Learning about Arthropod Vectors. Together, they developed these augmented reality tools to help students visualize arthropod species, or invertebrate animals with a segmented body such as spiders, crabs and millipedes.

Students have used these tools and presented their findings at national conferences, with one team winning third place at the American Dairy Science Association. Eventually, the goal is that these tools can improve veterinary education and create outreach potential for community engagement.

by Gigi Fisher