Elizabeth Rood, EdD

Elizabeth Rood is an education adviser, researcher, and writer with expertise in youth development, learning, and participatory program design. She is the Founder and Principal of Learning Designs Consulting, which provides advisory services in educational media and experiential learning. Prior, she served as Vice President of Education at the Bay Area Discovery Museum and Director of the Center for Childhood Creativity, the research arm of the museum. Elizabeth also has a background in formal urban education, as a teacher, principal, and leadership coach in San Francisco public schools. Elizabeth currently serves as the National Vice President of the Children’s Media Association, a professional organization connecting people in a wide range of kids’ media and technology industries.

Colin Angevine

Colin Angevine is a fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and a designer and facilitator at Onward. His work focuses on themes of equity, design, and collaboration. Colin’s perspective draws from previous work experiences as an educator (in middle and high schools), a technologist (in edtech and legal tech startups), and as a researcher (in researcher-practitioner partnerships). In previous work, Colin was the project director for Challenge Collaboratives at Digital Promise, where he developed and facilitated new models for equity-driven R&D in education. Colin holds a B.A. from Dickinson College in Classics and an M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania in Learning Sciences and Technologies. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Rafi Santo, PhD

Rafi Santo, principal researcher at Telos Learning, is a learning scientist focused on the intersection of digital culture, education, and institutional change. Centering his work within research-practice partnerships, he has studied, collaborated with, and facilitated a range of organizational networks related to digital learning, computing, and technology in education. Within informal education, he has focused on the design of innovation networks as co-founder of Hive Research Lab, a partnership with the Hive NYC Learning Network collective of over 70 informal learning organizations. In K12 schooling, he’s partnered with CSforALL to support and study school districts as they develop equitable and sustainable computing education initiatives. His scholarship spans multiple levels of activity—from understanding youth learning pathways across settings to investigating policy implementation and organizational network design—in order to develop practical insights that come from a holistic perspective. His work has been supported by the Spencer Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, the Susan Crown Exchange, and Google. Rafi holds a PhD in Learning and Developmental Sciences from Indiana University.

Jordan Shapiro, Ph.D

Jordan Shapiro, Ph.d. is Forbes’ leading columnist on global education, learning through digital play, kids and culture. An internationally known speaker and consultant on education technology, school reform, and 21st Century child-rearing, his unique perspective combines psychology, philosophy, economics, and mythology in unexpected ways. He has helped clients like the United States Air Force and Thomas Edison State College reconsider how to empower individuals with sophisticated critical thinking skills. During the week, you can find him in the classroom at Temple University, where he teaches in the Intellectual Heritage Program and serves as the Associate Director for Digital Innovation at the College of Liberal Arts. In March of 2018, Jordan wrote Digital Play for Global Citizens, a guide published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and intended to introduce educators, youth development leaders, and parents to innovative technology tools which can help children learn about, understand, and engage with our increasingly interconnected world. (Twitter: @Jordosh)

Jason Yip, PhD

Dr. Yip is an assistant professor of digital youth at The Information School at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on how the design and implementation of new learning technologies can support participatory learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) between children and families. He was a Cooney Center Fellow from 2013-2014.

Prior to his life as a researcher, Jason taught K-12 science and math for ten years. He completed both his undergraduate degree in chemistry and masters in science and math education at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Maryland’s College of Education. He is also an affiliate of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at Maryland.

Jason’s research focuses on partnering with children and families in the design of learning technologies and environments for STEM learning. At the HCIL, he was a member of Kidsteam, an intergenerational and interdisciplinary design team composed of children (ages 7-17) and adult researchers that design new technologies. Through Kidsteam, Jason has worked with a number of collaborations with companies and non-profit organizations, such as Nickelodeon, the National Parks Service, Google, and National Geographic to develop new children’s technologies. For his dissertation, he studied the identity development and science ownership of children in an afterschool program called Kitchen Chemistry, in which children explore science through the development of their own personal food investigations.

Jason’s research has been published in many journals and conferences such as Interaction Design and Children (IDC), the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), and the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).