Helen Catherine Wauck

Helen is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She studies the development of digital games for training spatial reasoning skills to increase STEM competency. Her current approach to studying game-based training utilizes "in the wild" methods - conducting studies with limited or absent extrinsic incentives for participation in online, anonymous settings, in order to gain a more ecologically valid sense of how likely students would be to play spatial skill training games on their own, outside of a laboratory context. Helen and her interdisciplinary research team work together to design and implement their own spatial skill training games for research studies.