Grants Awarded by the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation

The spring 2014 projects selected to receive funding from the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation are:

Re-playing the Past: Building a Digital Game for the History Classroom – A team led by Anne Sarah Rubin, Associate Professor of History, brings together history and game development to immerse students in Civil War Baltimore. Linking history and computer science/visual arts courses through gamification, graduate historians and undergraduate game developers will collaborate to create a game prototype that both engages and educates students in the "world" of the past. By playing the game, students will better understand the limits of knowledge, resources, and abilities that confronted and confounded people who participated in historic events.

The Future of Feedback: An Audio-Only Response to Writing – A team led by Sally Shivnan, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of the Writing and Rhetoric Division, will address the challenges of providing quality feedback on students' writing by exploring audio comments as a way to produce effective, timely comments on student drafts. Using iAnnotate, a popular Apple mobile and tablet application, the team of faculty investigators will measure the effectiveness of audio-only commenting on student drafts to determine its impact on student learning and retention, as well as the faculty experience.