Ivon Arroyo

A true hybrid across disciplines, Ivon Arroyo specializes in learning sciences, computer science, and educational/cognitive psychology. Her expertise is in the design of novel technologies for learning and assessment for K-12 students studying mathematics.

Synergistic Activities

1. Research Leadership: Prof. Arroyo has served as PI or co-PI on more than 20 research projects involving the design, development, and research of advanced learning technologies for K-12 and higher education. She has been supported on these projects by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Education Sciences, the Gates Foundation, and seed funding awards from UMass Amherst. Most relevant to this project, her NSF CAREER award consisted of an innovation of cell-phone embodied math games, bringing this to schools/afterschools. These are active math games that require children to find mathematics within the real objects of classrooms, gyms and playgrounds, through a platform now called WearableLearning. A second set of NSF awards (EAGER & IIS-Cyberlearning) regarded mathematical game creation by students, as a process toward development of Computational Thinking skills through WearableLearning’s Game Editor, students creating embodied math games themselves for their peers to play. She is also currently PI on an NSF IUSE award that aims to explore the potential of ethics education for computer science students via online immersive simulated ethics scenarios. This encompasses developing methods to assess the impact of a prototype CS ethics simulation platform, as well as exploring methods for increasing effectiveness of student engagement and learning, and methods for incorporating the tool into the CS curriculum.

2. Software Research and Development: Prof. Arroyo has over 20 years of experience in STEM learning software research and development, within academia. These products are as vital as publications and presentations about the research, which can only be carried out once the large-scale software and curricular development pieces are developed, piloted, and implemented. WearableLearning supports the creation and management of games themselves, and these math game-like activities are also matters of research, constituting towards its Library of Math Games. Arroyo has also been part of the MathSpring.org software development team since its inception circa year 2000: the software contains about 1,000 mathematics word problems mapped to Common Core Standards. Past research has focused on supporting students affectively as they practice mathematics, and current efforts regard localizing MathSpring to the needs of multilingual students that speak Spanish at home (e.g. translating math word problems to Spanish and creating Learning Companions that reflect their identities). We have particularly tailored MathSpring to Puerto-Rican Spanish, and localized it to one Latin-American country (Argentina), where the so-called “Cultivando Matemáticas” was successfully immersed in the math curriculum of three schools, yielding positive math learning as well as positive affective results.

3. Service to the Research Community: Prof. Arroyo has been an Editorial Board Member for the Journal of AI in Education (IJAIED) for many years, and also a Board Member of the User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction (UMAP) Society. She has been a reviewer for conferences in Learning Sciences and Learning Technologies, as well as several journals, such as the Journal of the Learning Sciences, Journal of Educational Psychology, Journal on Educational Data Mining, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, as well as Metacognition & Learning. Arroyo has been an NSF grant proposal panelist for about 7 times since 2010.

4. Honors and Awards: Prof. Arroyo has authored or co-authored over 100 publications (journal papers, book chapters and research articles at prestigious conferences) and is well-cited. She has been the first Author of two Best Paper Awards --International Conference on Educational Data Mining (2010) and the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (2009), and
nominated for others several times. She was given a CAREER award by NSF in 2014. Arroyo was awarded a Fulbright Masters Program Fellowship in 1997 from the Argentine Fulbright Commission to engage in graduate studies in Computer Science and Education in the United States.