Talk about your experience at the University of Michigan.
请简要谈一谈您在密歇根大学的学习生涯。
I studied for Ph.D. in EECS during 2000~2005. My research was about wireless communications and I also worked as GSI for 4 years. During the last two years of Ph.D. study, I also served as an adjunct lecturer in a design-oriented course for EECS.
How did the university influence your career?
在密歇根大学的经历对您的职业有什么样的影响？
During my years in Michigan, I was significantly influenced by the great teaching of the university. As a result, I spent a lot of effort in my GSI work and later my lecture work. I really enjoyed teaching in Michigan and I was awarded University of Michigan Outstanding GSI Award, as well as the GSI awards of EECS, and College of Engineering. The experience in Michigan and the inspiration I got from the EECS faculty, really helped me find my talent and passion in teaching. It is also the reason why I was so devoted to innovations in teaching.
What inspired you to create PaGamO?
有哪些因素促使您发明了PaGamO?
As a teacher, I think the most challenging task is to get students engaged and motivated to the course. This is more and more challenging as students nowadays grew up with many distraction in the external world. This is why I want to develop a system that can help teachers worldwide to get students engaged to learning. Since most students nowadays really like to play game, especially multi-player social games. The question came to our mind that, instead of being a threat to learning, can we use gamefication as our helper to regain students’ attention back to learning? This is the reason why we created PaGamO, we hope to build a tool that can be used by teachers of any subjects.
Tell us about an experience, realization, or a best moment or most difficult moment from your research or the creation of PaGamO.
请与我们分享您在研究和发明PaGamO过程中最令人兴奋的时刻或者最困难的时刻。
PaGamO was first launched in my Coursera course, “Probability” in Sep. 2013, which is also the first-ever MOOC in the world taught in Chinese. As the first MOOC in Chinese, we got overwhelming student enrollments to the MOOC. We were really worried if PaGamO works well with so many users. It turned out to be a great success. A year later, we won the Overall Award from Wharton/QS 2014 Reimagine Education Award, so-called the “Oscars” of innovation in higher educations, among 427 teams from 43 countries. This was another great milestone for us. It helped us gain the global visibility and our startup and finished series A with 6 million USD investment from Foxconn. Now our system is used worldwide for students of all ages in K12, as well as in corporate training and college use. The Dental School of University of Pennsylvania is also using PaGamO to help student learn for effectively. I was also very honored to receive the highest award for innovations in Taiwan, the Presidential Innovation Award 2016 (please keep the name in English without translating in Chinese).
What do want people to learn from the game you and your team created?
您最希望大家从您和您的团队发明的游戏中获得什么？
I want people to realize that different generations of students have different characters. As a teacher, we always need to find the best way to engage our student, and the solution will change over time. We hope our experience can give teachers more confidence and courage to develop new solutions for teaching.
