Featuring over a dozen interactive media and game design<\/a> presentations, five panel presentations, and over 100 poster presentations, Clark\u2019s biannual research showcase encompasses students in every department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lauren Gallagher \u201926 is using interactive media<\/a> to reflect on the intersection of natural resource mining with data mining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “My game, Monster Byte Balance, is designed around data. I imagined a monster composed of a variety of data visualization charts munching on energy to grow,\u201d Gallagher says. \u201cThe game evolved from this image into a balance-management game where the player must click on buttons, each representing different resources, to feed and grow the data monster to advance technology without destroying the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gallagher says one thing she has learned from this project is that everything has a cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt has been long speculated that there are ripple effects and consequences to natural resource mining and data mining,\u201d Gallagher says. \u201cI hoped to capture this with Monster Byte Balance by having players play with balancing nature and technology.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n For their capstone, art history<\/a> majors are required to be a Peer Learning Assistant<\/a> in art history Professor Naomi Pitamber\u2019s course From the Stone Age to Our Age. Peer Learning Assistants are undergraduate students chosen by faculty to facilitate teaching. English<\/a> and art history major Abby Smith \u201925 was curious how students respond to lectures delivered by Peer Learning Assistants in comparison to professors and has gathered findings to present at ClarkFEST.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each Friday, Smith delivers a lecture and leads student discussions. She uses surveys to measure how well the material resonated and what students enjoyed about Smith\u2019s teaching style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI chose to study student engagement in student-run lectures because I wanted to help optimize our discussion sections,\u201d Smith says. Because the class is so large, time is limited and valuable. The discussions led by Peer Learning Assistants offer students a chance to practice skills. \u201cThis makes them all the more important when prepping for exams and synthesizing the material taught in class.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biology<\/a> major Darlene Polanco Molina \u201926 is studying the impact of HIV and AIDS on the local Worcester community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy passion for healthcare comes from my cultural upbringing and experiences as a first-generation college student. I believe that studying HIV\/AIDs in Worcester is crucial because it highlights how health disparities deeply affect marginalized communities like mine,\u201d Polanco Molina says. \u201cMany Latine individuals face barriers to healthcare, stigma, and lack of sexual health education \u2013 which all worsen the impact of HIV\/AIDs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Polanco Molina believes that research like hers can help in the push for more equitable healthcare, and give voice to overlooked communities, and help break stereotypes about HIV and AIDS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Interactive media<\/a> and political science<\/a> double major Porter Orvetti \u201926 has been working on three games based on global social movements, including the Tunisian Revolution, the Women\u2019s Suffrage Movement, and Poland\u2019s Solidarity Movement. They take the form of a card game, a roleplaying game, and a text adventure game, respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe goal of these projects was to use games as a way to teach about important protest movements in a fun and engaging new way,\u201d Orvetti says. \u201cWhile you can learn a lot about a topic by reading a book or watching a documentary, games allow you to be placed directly into someone else\u2019s shoes, experiencing their life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhile most \u2018political\u2019 games focus on large-scale issues like war, I wanted to focus on the often-lost human element of social movements. I transformed the types of decisions, struggles, and everyday life that someone in each movement experienced into games that teach you as you play.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Leo Brisson \u201925, an English<\/a> and geography<\/a> double major, centers his creative writing project on the fictionalized lives of American volunteers serving in the Republican brigades of the Spanish Civil War. The project was funded through the Steinbrecher Fellowship Program this past summer and was conducted at NYU\u2019s Tamiment Library and Wagner Labor Archives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have been writing short fiction based on the war and its American combatants and nurses,\u201d Brisson says. \u201cI chose to study the war and its American volunteers in honor of my great uncle, a brigade member who was committed to fighting fascism in the U.S. and Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ClarkFEST to highlight student research through traditional and interactive exhibits<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":20922,"template":"","meta":{"story_color":"var(--clarku-color-light-teal)","story_headerImg":20922,"section_label":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[223],"displayed_author":[228],"featured":[493],"topic":[250,266,196,162,163,127,121],"class_list":["post-20916","story","type-story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clark-community","displayed_author-abbie-hart-25","featured-primary","topic-arts","topic-clarkfest","topic-humanities","topic-research","topic-sciences","topic-undergraduate-research","topic-undergraduate-students"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"student](\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024_ClarkFEST_Oct_30-083-1024x683.jpg\")
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