STORY: Student Researchers Invited to Design New Harvard Workshop After Successful FIE Trip

February 19, 2025

As a result of their presentation at last October's Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference, five students on Professor Yevgeniya V. Zastavker's Learning Journeys research team have been invited to design and implement a new workshop at Harvard University that aims to make a difference by "Hacking Injustice."

Each year, Dr. Zastavker, professor of physics and education at Olin, brings students from her Education Research group to Frontiers in Education (FIE) - a major international conference focusing on educational innovations and research in engineering and computing education.

Students co-present papers and research they've developed with Zastavker, to the global FIE audience. In addition to presentations, the Oliners attend sessions relevant to their own scholarship and career goals, broadening their knowledge of engineering education.

From Classroom to Global Stage

"This was the first conference I've ever attended, let alone presented at," says Dan Khoi Nguyen '27 reflecting on the 2024 trip.

After Nguyen's team presented, professors, researchers, and other undergraduate students approached them to talk about their research.

"It was an amazing experience. It felt as though people understood it and really cared about the effort we put in to our work," says Nguyen.

It's a critical opportunity for student development. At FIE each year, Olin undergrads take the international stage - some, like Nguyen, for the first time, learning "how to present our work, to disseminate our findings in the language that is their own, to practice presentation skills and networking, and to also meet potential graduate school representatives and employers,” says Zastavker.

Now, possibly for the first time at Olin as a result of a conference presentation, students will also get to design and implement their own workshop this spring at a student-led event at another institution (more below on this special invite).

The Oliners from Dr. Zastavker's Education Research group (undergrads co-creating year-round with faculty is something that sets Olin apart from other schools) who attended the 2024 conference - themed as Embracing the Challenges and Transforming Engineering and Computing Education in a Technology-Enhanced World - included: Jen Sundstom '24; Prisha Bhatia '26; Adhishri Hande '25; Khue Pham '25; Vaani Bhatnagar '25; Dan Khoi Nguyen '27; Manu de Tezanos Pinto '26; Maya Adelman '27; Alexander Qazilbash '27; Alexa Deeter '26, and Ellie Ramos '25.

Most institutions that develop cutting-edge research have graduate programs with graduate students performing most of the work and undergraduates, if any, serving in fewer (or none) leading capacities.

Each of the students who attended FIE in 2024 (and each year since at least 2019) work first-hand with Dr. Zastavker - not only growing and exercising their curiosity for learning and engineering, but also getting the opportunity to connect what they've learned to real-world challenges. 

“Working with Dr. Zastavker over the past year has given me countless benefits within and outside of the research space. She provided me with an outlet for applying the skills I had learned at Olin. Now I view how my interest in engineering can be applied through education to help myself and others learn in a more meaningful way," says Manuel de Tezanos Pinto '26.

A Space of Belonging...and Innovation 

Due to the size of Olin's community, students and faculty develop tight interpersonal relationships within the research environment on campus, "allowing for a more personalized mentorship, something that is challenging to do in large institutions and certainly something that is challenging to do even within small institutions in the absence of a tightly knit community of people who have similar interests and are driven by similar goals," says Zastavker, who served as last co-author (i.e., the researcher who leads the project and all relevant aspects of the project work) on all four of the student papers presented at the FIE.

Over the years, Zastavker's research group has also become a space of belonging for many Olin students who want to embrace other, non-technical ways of being, in support of holistic development of all their identities.

And the personalized research mentorship engenders a real sense of pride in the work. 

"Both the work that I do and my own personal development have greatly benefited from the guidance and one-on-one mentorship I’ve received as part of the research team. It is because of the guidance and support I have received from Dr. Zastavker that I hold my work to such a high standard and take real pride in what I do," says Alexa Deeter '26.

Once at the Washington D.C. conference, the students presented four papers to a live audience of professional researchers from international institutions, as well as to some friendly faces from closer to home. (Paper titles, authors, and pdfs, including an Olin faculty paper, are at the end of this story).

"We worked extremely hard the entire spring semester to get our paper “camera ready,” and this was a big moment for us to present our work," says Adhishri Hande '25.

And with professors Jonathan Stolk, Georgia Van de Zande, Steve Matsumoto, and Whitney Lohymeyer, all in attendance, along with Zastavker, the conference in 2024 (and each year) serves as a good example of how Olin's multidisciplinary, impact-centered education happens both inside and outside of the classroom.

"One thing that I found really interesting was how many people at FIE were talking about project-based learning and multidisciplinary learning as innovative. Oliners have been engaged in this work for many years! I learned how hard it is at a "traditional" school to incorporate even one integrated engineering course like PIE. I feel lucky to go Olin where that innovation is normalized," added Adhishri Hande '25. 

This was Olin senior Vaani Bhatnagar's third FIE conference and while in D.C. she was eager to accomplish some personal goals. Besides successfully sharing the team's work, which included incorporating 3D artifacts into the presentation, Bhatnagar wanted to gain a deeper understanding of the breadth of engineering education research.

"I attended multiple presentations about different pedagogies, such as improving K-12 education, hands-on learning, and teaming, to name just a few. My favorite was conducted by Jon Stolk about how to understand student motivation in the classroom," says Bhatnagar. 

Stolk's session gave attendees a closer look at student motivation through the professors’ perspective, sharing insight into how to go about making decisions about assignments in an effort to foster student engagement and motivation. 

Also an Olin senior, Khue Pham '25 shared how they experienced "a lot of Olin pride watching other students from my research team ace their presentations, as well as watching Jon Stolk demonstrate a masterclass on a topic I greatly care about - motivation theories and how to improve students’ learning efficacy."

This faculty-student professional familiarity and interaction - combined with experiential learning and innovation, is another key aspect of Olin's curriculum, and one reason why scholars, educators, and students from other institutions look to collaborate with and learn from Oliners.

"Stepping out of Olin to explore and interact with different faculty and students is important to gain a wider understanding of engineering education. It helped me to understand just how unique Olin is and how we can help move education forward," says Vaani Bhatnagar '25.

Journeying Toward a More Equitable Future

Most recently, this desire for a comprehensive understanding of engineering education, and an awareness of how engineering can serve as an inroad to a better, more equitable future - in this case, as Zastavker notes, "by contributing to the core knowledge about the ways in which a variety of learning environments – formal and informal, traditional and non-traditional – contribute to the development of students’ personal and professional identity, including both learner and engineering identities" - has materialized in a unique opportunity.

Five students from Zastavker's Learning Journeys research team have been invited to join the Harvard-Olin venture >Engineering Hope_after a Harvard member, in the audience at FIE, saw the presentation of their paper, Meta Analysis of Student-Researchers’ Learning Journeys Through a Reflective Practice.

The Oliners, Bhatnagar, Hande, Bhatia, Nguyen, and de Tezanos Pinto, were then asked to co-design and implement their workshop idea "Hacking Identity to Hack Justice” during Hacking Injustice - a student hackathon this spring at Harvard University.

Read the Hackathon one pager

Hacking Injustice is conceived as a hackathon that'll explore the intersections of local movements and technology. It's modeled after MIT CSAIL’s HackDisability, which paired teams of students with an area of disability, encouraging student pairs to uncover applications for AI to advance access under a given disability.

The Harvard-Olin collaborative hopes Hacking Injustice will reframe this model, partnering with local advocates in various social justice arenas to explore how students can build technology that bolsters their advocacy. Sample arenas include:

• Housing justice (affordability crisis & homelessness)
• Environmental justice
• Climate policy
• Racial justice
• Criminal justice

At a traditional hackathon, the environment is very much “go-go-go” without a break to reflect on the motivations of individuals when they're choosing to engage in the hackathon activities.

Together with the Harvard team, Oliners have "created an innovative spin on the traditional hackathon that allows for the participants to engage in an intentional reflective process about their engineering identities and motivations to focus on public interest technologies," says Zastavker.

The goal of this innovation is to allow hackathoners opportunities for a more meaningful, identity-based engagement in what they create during the event.

In Dr. Zastavker's research group there's a large emphasis placed on student agency and autonomy in choosing the direction of investigation. This exciting opportunity for the Oliners to co-design and implement the workshop is just more proof of the benefits of having students pursue research questions that they themselves develop based, in part, on their own interests, motivations, learning journeys. 

Papers presented at the 2024 FIE Conference:

• For the Love of the Game: Exploring Student Motivation in Game-Based Learning Environments (Alexa Deeter, Grant Goodall, Khue Pham, Jen L Sundstrom, Alexander Qazilbash, Yevgeniya V Zastavker). 
• Investigating Students’ Emotions and Motivations in a Game-Based Learning Environment (Alexa Deeter, Grant Goodall, Khue Pham, Jen L Sundstrom, Alexander Qazilbash, Yevgeniya V Zastavker).
• Meta Analysis of Student-Researchers’ Learning Journeys Through a Reflective Practice (Vaani Bhatnagar, Adhishri Hande, Prisha Bhatia, Meagan Martin, Dan Khoi Nguyen, Manu de Tezanos Pinto).
• Contemplative Practices' Effects on Compassion, Belonging, and Self-Empowerment in Undergraduate Engineering Experiences (Jen L Sundstrom, Eleanor Ramos, and Yevgeniya V. Zastavker).
• Towards a Sustainability Practice and Ethos in a First-Year, Engineering Design Experience (Georgia D. Van de Zande, Benjamin Linder, Yevgeniya V. Zastavker)