ISU Innovation Prize Winners

The ISU Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship and Agricultural Entrepreneurship organized the event The ISU Innovation Prize on the weekend of November 8-9, 2019.  It was facilitated at the ISU Economic Development Core Facility in ISU Research Park. There were three focus areas for participants to work on, AgTech, EdTech, and Global Impact. Dr. Larysa Nadolny and her team (Chuanli Zhou, Imtiajul Alam, Long He, and Ramanathan Annamalai) won the first prize in EDTech category.

The challenge for EdTech was as follows:

How do we design & reinvent learning for a better experience (quality & value) in an age of accelerating technology?

Dr. Nadolny and her team worked on augmented reality technology for middle and high school students’ quick assessment and support in the classroom. In a traditional classroom, there are often too many students to be taken care of by a single instructor. It is even harder for a teacher to spot a student who is struggling for a specific day. It has been established in numerous studies that middle and high school students struggle for a period of time before they drop out of school. Absence in the class, failing to finish homework, feeling less motivated, and lack of confidence are some of the signs and behavioral pattern of struggling students.

In the proposal, students will fill up a short questionnaire in a tablet answering their homework, motivation, feelings, and level of confidence. Hence, once the class started all the data are ready in a server for the class teacher. The class teacher will wear a google glass where the teacher can see those surveys at a glance and can spot struggling students immediately as the survey result will be displayed graphically on google glass screen. The teacher then can prioritize the students based on their specific needs and challenges and help them succeed.

In the U.S., every fifteen seconds there is a student drop out which has been resulting in 1.2 million of total drop out every year. The lack of motivation, not feeling attached to the school, missing homework, and high absence are few of the proven signs and trends of school dropout. The proposed early detection system will help class teacher to spot struggling students and help them connect with academic, administrative, and other available resources through augmented reality apps using google glass.

Esports on the ISU Campus

Several members of the Research Network for Game Studies have been closely involved in the exciting projects around esports on the ISU campus. We are making progress towards a 2020/2021 grand opening of the new gaming and esports facility and collaborating together on gaming projects and research.

Want to know more? Read some of the news articles below:

Adventure. Game on. Picture this. It’s a heated intramural competition. Players are giving it their all. Striving for victory. Playing their hearts out. So, is this competition happening on a football field? Maybe a basketball court? Nope. It’s all happening in front of a computer screen.

Iowa State to build new gaming space. Construction for a robust student gaming center is underway and could set standards for collegiate gaming programs.

Iowa State Investing in Esports & Gaming, Transitioning Club to Sport Level. Video games are becoming more than just something students do in their free time on their futon in a college dorm room, they’re now reaching a competitive level. Starting this year, Iowa State University is supporting competitive gamers the same as sport club level athletes, being put in the same category as Cyclone hockey and baseball.

Iowa State esports community sees growth with construction of new gaming space. Esports is quickly expanding its presence at Iowa State. Construction for a student gaming center is underway with a hopeful completion date in the fall of 2020. Esports intramurals, which saw it’s introduction last semester with Rocket League, will see the introduction of Super Smash Bros. and Fortnite this semester.

Students and faculty show support for esports movement. For the past year, students and faculty at Iowa State have been working to get a new program off the ground. This program supports students wishing to play their favorite video games at a competitive level.