Allen School
Allen School Biography
I’m a senior Computer Science student at the University of Washington with an expected graduation date of Fall 2024. Additionally I have been a teachers assistant for the Fall 2022 offering of CSE 390Z. At the moment, I am a Student Relations Officer for Ability. Studying and teaching Computer Science here has required me to embrace a growth mindset, learn meta-cognitive skills, and apply them when learning technical skills.
Meta-cognitive Skills and Networking
At UW, one meta-cognitive skill I have been applying is building connections with peers, staff, and grad students. In particular one grad student I met with is Jesse Martinez, a PhD student at UW and a contributor to the Makeability Lab. We met at Ability Research Night and exchanged contact info. We scheduled a zoom meeting and we had a discussion about his contributions to the MakeAbility Lab at UW in creating accessible games for people to play. A sample from this meeting:
- Jesse uses the following methodology to determining accessibility needs for games.
- Starting with the most simple case: he’s trying to play a game with a friend with disability, as the resident games person he’s trying to host Accessible Game Nights and get people to play a game. Usually choosing the game arbitrarily depending on what can be played accessibly vs what we want to play. He is finding ways to make the games he owns be more accessible to his friends. Some questions he asks are:
- What are the different mechanics of the game?
- What is not blind accessible?
- What is not deaf accessible?
- Thinking of tools to create vs easy fixes for games (carving letters into tiles for games)
- Thinking of my friends specific needs
- Starting with the most simple case: he’s trying to play a game with a friend with disability, as the resident games person he’s trying to host Accessible Game Nights and get people to play a game. Usually choosing the game arbitrarily depending on what can be played accessibly vs what we want to play. He is finding ways to make the games he owns be more accessible to his friends. Some questions he asks are:
- Jesse has done consulting work for Exploding Kittens including a play test.
- He commented how difficult it is to get every disability perspective in a play test.
- Some cognition of mechanics helps to break down the game and figure out what is necessary.
- Choosing which accessibility barrier to look at.
- Jesse has done work with the MakeAbility lab add in accessibility options to Android educational games.
- By looking at Android educational games and ability to access via accessibility switches (interact without touching the screen). Many mobile games don’t have any selectable targets so switches are useless for them.
- This is accomplished using middleware to modify the game-play experience
- This is built on top of software already built for non games to enhance touch targets to be selectable via an accessibility switch.
Cornell Notes
Another important skill to succeed at the Allen School is using Cornell Notes. What Cornell Notes do is heighten note taking to take advantage of Bloom’s Taxonomy by including questions and summaries into notes for a lecture. By taking notes in this manner, I have retained more information from lecture and been able to know when to apply the information appropriately on projects. An example of my Cornell notes on using loads in computer architecture are provided here.
