“I love the ability to represent STEM concepts that I love but students tend to hate in ways that are fun, engaging, and effective.”
At Phenomena, our goal is to design learning experiences that help students see the joy in STEM and carry this valuable knowledge with them throughout their lives. Joy is infectious, and you can’t help but feel it in the experiences designed by Phenomena intern and undergraduate math and computer science student Sophia.
In just three short months, Sophia has created over 20 interactive learning experiences using Phenomena’s creator tool that lets users code their own interactives (more on that soon!). Not to mention contributing to the creator tool’s development by providing regular feedback to our developers and teaching others how to use the tool at this summer’s Phenomena Creator Camps. Her interest in how technology interfaces with the physical world comes through clearly in the way she smoothly integrates STEM topics into situations based in our everyday lives.
As her summer internship (very sadly!) comes to an end, we asked Sophia to reflect on her experience developing a new, dynamic educational medium for STEM students.
What excites you about making experiences on Phenomena?
I love the ability to represent STEM concepts that I love but students tend to hate in ways that are fun, engaging, and effective.
Describe a challenging moment you experienced while developing your experience.
The hard part of making an experience is rarely the implementation of your idea. Instead, it’s landing on the idea itself. What always trips me up is coming up with a way to represent things visually and experientially without complicating things too much. But, every time I overcome that hurdle and land on a final sketch, it’s incredibly exciting and well worth all the time and effort.
You’ve spent your summer creating learning experiences for others. What is one STEM topic you have always wanted to learn more about?
Big data! We all know our data is being sold and used all the time, but I recently realized that I don’t know any of the specifics surrounding how that’s happening and who the major players in that space are. Our data can be a real force for good, but not if we don’t understand what’s actively happening with it and why.
You can see all of the experiences created by Sophia and our other incredible interns and Phenomena Creator Camp attendees at phenomena.app.
We wish Sophia all the best as she begins a new school year, and we look forward to welcoming our fall interns soon (see our internship postings on Handshake if you’re interested!). And as Peter Sagal of NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me would say, if any of these topics are made into experiences, Sophia, we’ll ask you about them next time on our blog!
