Interaction designer is my title on paper, yes. But K-12 education advocate, youth mentor, and teacher are roles that I am equally proud to hold.
Education outreach
UX Menu design activity
Winter 2023 | In-person | Harrington Elementary School; Chelmsford, Massachusetts
User experience (UX) isn’t an area of study that we regularly expose elementary school students to. Why is that? I worked with the Chelmsford School District to launch a pilot UX lesson with five 4th grade classrooms. This pilot program sparked conversations around larger scale UX K-12 education programming at Red Hat, and was presented to the Chelmsford School Committee.
Teaching UX in local elementary school
Introduction to UX course
Spring 2022 | In-person | Jeremiah E. Burke High School; Dorchester, Massachusetts
I taught an ‘Introductory UX’ survey course to a Digital Literacy & Computer Science course over the course of 8 weeks on-site at the school to approximately 15 high school juniors. This work was was done in collaboration with with Boston PIC (Private Industry Council) on behalf of Red Hat. I created the curriculum for this workshop was developed from scratch by and built out a corresponding class website to keep everyone on track.
School field trip to the office
Virtual UX workshop series
Summer 2021, Summer 2020 | Various high schools in Boston Public School District
With the organizational help of the Boston PIC, I was connected with students from a variety of public high schools in the city of Boston to develop, from scratch, curriculum for and teach ‘Introductory UX’ via Zoom. Some students participated in the workshop series as an ‘elective’ for their STEM internship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, while others joined independently of an internship. I built out an entire Google Classroom environment for the students, teachers, and myself to stay organized in this remote setting.
Example student work
empathy building for students
2018, 2019, 2022, Spring 2023 (coming soon) | Middle schools in Boston Public School District
Working with the the Boston-based organization called STEMatch, I facilitated empathy-building workshops for 6th grade students using an original activity developed by myself and a coworker. This activity applied UX accessibility methodologies to the common games of UNO and Twister, through having students come up with accessible affordances for aspects of the games that are inaccessible to certain users (ie. how can someone with red-green color-blindness properly play ‘left foot, red’ on a Twister board?).
Students at the Red Hat STEMatch Career Day event
Women in stem panel
Fall 2019 | English High School; Boston, Massachusetts
The Boston PIC connected me with the English High School in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston where I had the unique opportunity to organize an informal panel-style event event for female and female identifying students to learn from women in various roles in STEM throughout different industries. Professionals in healthcare, public health, user experience, engineering, biology, and more sat down to have coffee and doughnuts with the students.
Mary introducing the panel discussion to students