Dr. Pierpaolo Dondio is the Principal Investigator of IG Lab. He is a lecturer in Computer Science at TU Dublin. He has research interests in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning with applications to AI& Education and game-based learning. His interests are on how intelligent and adaptable systems can be embedded in digital educational games to improve students' learning experience. He is also interested in how games could be used to make education more accessible and inclusive. Pierpaolo designed and implemented Seven Spells, a digital card game for teaching numerical skills and strategic thinking, which won three international awards. In September 2019, he launched the project Happy Maths, a research and engagement activity for primary school pupils, to test and roll-out his games in Schools.
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Dr. Mariana Rocha is the co-Principal Investigator of IG Lab. She is an assistant lecturer at the School of Computer Science in the Technological University Dublin. Her research interests are related to the use of technology for teaching and learning, especially considering digital games potential in STEM education. She has experience producing multimedia STEM content for children between 6 and 12 years old. During her PhD, Mariana designed and implemented Once Upon a Maths, an adventure web application for primary school children. The game is based in the real history of mathematics and makes use of situated learning to allow children work on their problem-solving skills. She is currently one of the leaders of the Junior Network Researchers in Serious Games, a project developed in collaboration with the Åbo Akademi Universit, in Finland, to support young researchers who work on developing studies about educational and serious games. Mariana is the co-founder of the Happy Maths project.
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Andre Almo is PhD student funded by D-Real SFI center. Andre is investigating how adaptation can make games more anxiety-aware. He is a biomedical scientist interested in neuroscience, science communication, education and game design. Andre wants to create tools and games to make science education more engaging and fun. He likes reading, brainstorming, travelling and, of course, gaming.
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Ilaria Furlan is a research assistant working on the Happy Maths project. She has a Master degree in Translation and Interpretation from University of Trieste. She previously worked in several outreach and education projects in schools, such as the Road Safety project for the province of Treviso in Italy, and she is a founding member of Italiamo, an association to promote Italian language and culture among bilingual kids. Regarding Happy Maths, Ilaria is responsible for the administration of the project, the delivery of the programme in schools and the organisation of data and schedules.
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Maíra Amaral is a MPhil student funded by TU Dublin. Her focus is on gender differences in maths anxiety and game-based learning. She has a Bachelor's degree in Social Communication - Journalism, a Master's degree in Communications and she is interested in science communication, education and serious games. Maíra believes that education can be fun through games and that it can help girls to engage more into it. She likes reading, watching movies and animation series, drawing, gaming and pets.
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Ephrem Tibebe is a full-time PhD student funded by TU Dublin. His PhD research focuses on Explainable AI (XAI), in particular, working on developing XAI methods for Recurrent Neural Networks. He is highly passionate about applying machine learning techniques to solve real-world problems. He is in charge of developing machine-learning models from the game log to increase adaptability and improve students' learning experience.
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Ryan Flood is a research assistant working on the IRC project Arithmos. Ryan graduated from TU Dublin with a first class honors in Game Design. His past professional projects have included a mobile app meant to help kids with anxiety and multiple VR training courses for pharmacists. In his free time, he has worked on a prototype card game in Unity.
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Dr. Flavia Santos is a member of the UCD Neuropsychology Lab and leads the UCD Music and Math Cognition research group. Currently she is awardee of the prestigious Ad Astra Fellowship (2019-2024) and an Assistant Professor at the UCD School of Psychology. She was the principal investigator in a project between Brazil and France funded by INSERM and FAPESP (2005-2007). In this project, instruments for diagnosis of developmental dyscalculia were adapted into Portuguese language. Since then, Dr Santos is working in the field of mathematic learning in childhood, with particular interest in intervention. In the last five years, she had a collaboration with a company in Switzerland - Dybuster, which elaborated digital instruments for training numerical cognition and MA in children.
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Dr. Attracta Brennan is a Lecturer with the School of Computer Science, NUI Galway, Ireland. Her research interests are in the areas of; adaptive learning systems, serious games, socio-technical systems (including VR/AR) to support older people with and without dementia, and predictive AI driven health applications with a particular emphasis on the study of osteoporosis and fracture related issues in order to reduce the burden and cost across all non-communicable diseases. Dr Brennan is the co-author of 1 book and co-contributor of 2 book chapters.
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