Dr. Megan Humburg
Research
My research centers on interdisciplinary blends of playful scientific inquiry practices with collaborative educational technologies and STEM, Arts, & Humanities disciplines. I design learning activities and technologies that spark curiosity, playfulness, and joy as students engage in inquiry together.
My projects focus on how we as educators and researchers can design activities that engage learners as whole people. My research often integrates student engagement with embodied learning activities, which leverage bodily motion as a resource for building understanding together. I have also helped to design and implement a variety of educational technologies, including mixed-reality environments, network analysis tools, and artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots to support engagement.
I have explored how student engagement manifests and can be supported across science, history, and music learning contexts, as well as across a variety of age groups (elementary, middle school, and post-secondary learners). What unites all this work is a desire to understand how and why learners engage with some activities and not others, so that we can design more effective and engaging learning environments that can reignite those 'lost sparks' for disengaged learners (and prevent them from being lost in the first place).
Employment
Currently, I work as a PostDoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, as a member of the EngageAI Institute. I am the lead designer and developer of SciStory: Pollinators, a 2D visual novel in which students investigate socio-scientific issues surrounding community gardens, food justice, and neighborhood land use. I collaborate with AI researchers and engineers to ethically design conversational agents (aka chatbots) driven by large-language models that can give feedback on student writing, answer science questions, and facilitate student-led inquiry. These agents are integrated into SciStory as different story characters to support learners' persuasive writing, evidence-based argumentation, and overall engagement with open-ended inquiry.
Teaching
I have taught several undergraduate courses about theories of teaching and learning, including Educational Psychology for Elementary Teachers and Educational Psychology for All Grades. I have taught both in-person and in asynchronous online contexts. I also taught a graduate-level course about AI in Education, a new course offering that I designed for the IU Learning Sciences program that emphasizes theoretical, ethical, and critical layers of designing and implementing AI tools for learning.
Education
I earned my Ph.D. in Learning and Developmental Sciences at Indiana University in 2022 and earned my Master's in Learning and Developmental Sciences (M.S.Ed.) at IU in 2017. I graduated with a Bachelor's of Arts in Psychology and Child Studies from Vanderbilt University in 2015.