Hammer Earns NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Jessica Hammer, a joint appointment with both the ETC and HCII, has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, the organization’s most prestigious award for young faculty members. The award will support her work on creating learning-supportive game-streaming interfaces.

Assistant Professor Jessica Hammer

Jess’s proposed project will apply her research interests in games and learning theory to the game streaming website Twitch.tv. To make the platform a more effective learning environment, Jess will use learning theory to inform the design of a more interactive viewer interface and will create new educational games that take advantage of viewer participation.

Two of the ETC projects dealing with Jess’s research in games and learning theory to Twitch have been in the spring 2019 semester, Commit to the Bits and during this semester, Commit 2 the Bits. Both project teams were looking to incorporationg an improvisational acting show on Twitch.

During this semester, the ETC project team Commit 2 the Bits aims to incorporate the rhythm of a full improv show on Twitch. In doing this, the students intend to develop technical toolkits that will ensure running smooth improv shows, identifying and building Audience Participatory Games interactions and mechanisms, and testing those through weekly improv shows. 

Commit 2 the Bits team logo

During the spring 2019 semester, the Commit to the Bits team work on a discovery project exploring the intersection of improvisational theater and Twitch live streaming. By applying factors unique to Twitch audiences such as their members’ mutual awareness and their potential for dramatic agency, we will design performative frameworks that embrace the character work, active decision-making, and role-playing inherent to improv. The team established new design principles through methodical playtesting and rapid prototyping, quantitatively and qualitatively exploring the mediums’ overlap over the course of the semester that helped with the current semester project.

Commit to the Bits team logo

Congratulations to Jessica, and we can’t wait to see where the research takes the ETC students next!

This post contains information from School of Computer Science new page: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/news/hammer-earns-nsf-career-award


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