Mighty Chen

teacher technologist researcher

About

Hi! I'm Mighty Chen. I'm currently (Fall 2023) a Product Manager on the Learning Experience, Platform team at Amplify Education. I think about the features we have available on the Desmos Classroom Activity Builder. My work is inspired by my previous experiences as a high school mathematics/computer science teacher and as a learning sciences student.


I love learning about learning and designing meaningful spaces or artifacts to help students learn. My current research focuses on critical computational studies, embodiment, and mathematics education. I am especially interested in taking these ideas out of "science island" and scaling the transformative work that has been done in various educational research communities. My master's thesis (available upon request) uses computer vision algorithms on cheap webcams to create a mixed reality system which projects students' locations in a room onto a Desmos graph.


Technology

Associate Product Manager

Amplify Education

Sep 2023 - Present

Maintaining, pitching, and ideating various features of the Amplify/Desmos Classroom platform to support the development of math, science, and ela products across the Amplify suite.

Interaction Developer

Amplify Education

Aug 2022 - Sep 2023

Developed Desmos-based curriculum with emphasis on how students interact and experience digital artifacts. Worked with designers, curriculum developers, and content specialists to create and ideate digital interactions for various Amplify products.

Software Engineering Intern

CodeHS

Jun 2019 - Aug 2019

Migrated existing software into a new system. I interfaced, tested, and refined new database models to existing and new web pages over the site and played an active role in design planning and decision making. Much thanks to John Kelly who actively mentored me and the other interns (Saar Sayfan, Emily Cang, Robert Slutsky).

Data Science Intern

Lawrence Livermore National Lab

May 2019

Data Science Challenge hosted by LLNL. Worked under Brenden Petersen for Deep Symbolic Regression, which generates an equation, given an input set of data. Added data visualization and regularization to a reinforcement learning model to simplify generated expressions.

Teaching

Mathematics/CS Teacher

Mariposa County High School

Jul 2020 - Jul 2022

Mathematics teacher for Integrated Math II creating CPM curriculum on Desmos and NetLogo. Computer Science Teacher using a self-made NetLogo curriculum. Teaching with an emphasis on constructing artifacts, driving student curiousity, and analyzing representations (tools) based on affordances and consequences. Awarded Mariposa Gazette's Best Teacher in the County in 2022.

Student Teacher

Golden Valley High School

Jan 2020 - Jun 2020

Coordinated with Lorena Arroyo to refine teaching practices, classroom management, lesson design for an Integrated Math II class. Coursework significantly modified during COVID-19 crisis with a refocus on student physical and mental wellbeing. Hosted online asynchronous lessons using Desmos and NetLogo.

Curriculum Designer

CalTeach UC Merced

Jan 2020 - Mar 2020

Designed, researched, and implemented lesson plans and activites for the UC Merced's Learning Lab! Made-- Cardboard "lego" pieces for geometric proofs, some NetLogo models (sector area, arc length), string to understand trigonometric ratios, Turtle art, and Zombie Infections.

Stay Home and Code with NetLogo!

CalTeach UC Merced

July 2020, 2021

Planned curriculum, created material, taught two one-week sections of a NetLogo class which covered art, games, and simulations to help middle and high school understand the effects of staying home and socially distancing during a virus pandemic.

Robotics Mentor

Pioneers in Engineering

Jan 2019 - May 2019

Closely mentored a group of ~10 students from El Cerrito High School for a robotics competition by providing support in group management, mechanical design, and software development throughout the semester.

Peer Tutor

Bright Success Center

Mar 2017 - Dec 2019

Tutored over 300 hours for various computer science classes and developed strategies to help peers learn computer science. These learning strategies are passed down to students and newer tutors (and myself) in sessions that are held like office hours, where students come in at designated times to receive help with questions and coursework.

Research

Whole-Bodied, Ensembled, Mixed-Reality Mathematics

Master's Thesis

Oct 2021 - Dec 2022

By repurposing low-cost hardware purchased during the pandemic, we can create spaces for students to learn and demonstrate learning through group-based movement. Students hold AruCo markers which are detected by a system of webcams to project their position in the room onto a graph, and "become" points on a graph. This leads into easily into any kind of mathematical activity--polygon transformations, function shifts, drawing a line between two students, etc. This project is overseen by Dr. Earl Aguilera, Dr. Lynette Guzman, and Dr. Alexandria Hansen. Work in Progress presentations at CSCL 2022 and IDC 2022.

Proceduralized Ideologies in Teacher Simulation Software

with Dr. Earl Aguilera

Jun 2021 - Dec 2022

Using qualitative, interpretive analysis to walk through teaching simulation software, simSchool to provide critical perspectives on technology in teaching and learning. We shared analysis in a roundtable at AERA 2022 and in an upcoming edited volume by Phil Nichols and Antero Garcia.

Tangible Turtles

Inclusive Interaction Lab

Sep 2019 - May 2020

Recreating Papert's Turtle at low cost to provide students with an tangle, interactive solution for teaching computer science, computational thinking, and mathematics. Worked with Daniel Milliate on CAD and mechanical engineering. Project is overseen by Ahmed Arif through UC Merced's HCI Group and is held in the CalTeach Learning Lab

Research Assistant

Center for Early Cognition and Language

Jan 2020 - May 2020

Worked on creating transcripts of user studies for qualitative analysis, using ELAN. Created an automated Python script to create annotations when participants are speaking.

Probability and Coding Simulations

Embodied Design Research Labratory

Mar 2019 - Apr 2019

Final project for EDUC 130 (Knowing and Learning in Mathematics and Science). Interaction analysis of students coding through a Python simulation of the RC Cola Problem. Defined different styles of coding and discussed the limitations and affordances of each in terms of mathematical discussion and understanding.

Early Warning Decision Tree

Florin Rusu & Autonomic

Jan 2018 - Jun 2018

Mentored under Carlos Garcia-Alvarado, Jorge Orbay, and Xin Zhang from Autonomic to build an application of data streaming through Kafka and decision trees through Weka. The app takes in live data, determines if a car has crashed or near-crashed, and displays the result, with a 89.01% accuracy over all instances in the dataset.

Consequence Aware Drone

MESA Lab

Jan 2018 - May 2019

MESA lab built a classifier of good versus bad pilots through their remote control signals logs. Once known, the quadcopter would take any appropriate action (emergency land, switch to auto-pilot, etc.). We explored the use of generative adversarial networks to generate pilot flight logs to feed into simulations as well. Explored various simulation softwares to train neural networks and onboarded new students to learn introductory robotics.

Education

M.A. Education

CSU Fresno

2021 - Present

Education Psychology; Integrating Technology into Curriculum; Advanced Curriculum; Literacy, Language, Literature; Research in Education; Motivation, Design, and Instruction; Educational Applications of Technology; Instructional Theory;

B.S. Computer Science and Engineering

UC Merced

2016 - 2020

Human Comptuer Interaction; Software Engineering; Data Science; Databases; Object Oriented Programming; Applied Modern Statistics; Robotics; Algorithm Design and Analysis; Artificial Intelligence; Probability and Statistics; Discrete Mathematics; Data Structures; Computer Organization; Linear Analysis; Circuit Theory

single subject mathematics credential

UC Merced & UC Berkeley

2017 - 2020

Learning and Knowing in Mathematics and Science; History of Science, Technology, and Society; Teaching Mathematics in Middle School/High School; Project-Based Instruction; Classroom Interactions (Equity in Classrooms); Integrating Research Methods in K-12 Classrooms; Developmental Psychology; Cognitive Development