Media Mentality is a media education resource website designed to aid students in early career development. This project was developed with a few goals in mind: improve accessibility, provide opportunity and inspire a new generation of the workforce. We wanted to level the playing field as students enter undergraduate programs with varying degrees of experience. We see this website as an opportunity for interested parties to continue the research and add to the wealth of knowledge in a student worker role. The hope is that students, particularly freshman and first-year transfer students will utilize the site, expand their horizons, learn about all the career opportunities available to them, and push the envelope when it comes to the curriculum taught at Arizona State University. Visit www.mediamentality.com

Media Mentality is a media education resource website designed to aid students in early career development. This project was developed with a few goals in mind: improve accessibility, provide opportunity and inspire a new generation of the workforce. We wanted to level the playing field as students enter undergraduate programs with varying degrees of experience. We see this website as an opportunity for interested parties to continue the research and add to the wealth of knowledge in a student worker role. The hope is that students, particularly freshman and first-year transfer students will utilize the site, expand their horizons, learn about all the career opportunities available to them, and push the envelope when it comes to curriculum taught at Arizona State University.

This research study investigates the design principles and best practices for incorporating gamification in EduMobile apps for teaching about mosquito breeding grounds. With limited research investigating the effectiveness of EduMobile apps in engaging and educating students on complex topics, this study aims to uncover best practices for designing EduMobile apps for early learners (elementary and middle schoolers). A convenience sample of adults who were not part of the target demographic were recruited to test the app. The System Usability Scale was used to measure user satisfaction, and question-wise t-tests were conducted to analyze the effectiveness of specific design changes. Results show a significant difference in user satisfaction between the original and revised designs, with question 5 of the System Usability Scale driving the overall difference in score. Inconsistent design was found to increase extraneous cognitive load and split attention, while consistency within different views was shown to increase user perception of system integration. These findings suggest that incorporating gamification and following best practices in designing EduMobile apps can increase student engagement and motivation in learning about mosquito breeding grounds.

The majority of the public is not aware that common objects in their backyard can be mosquito breeding sites, thus leading to an increase in mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases affecting humans and animals during the peak seasons. An engaging app that instructs people of all ages how to identify, prevent, and eliminate breeding sites may be of use in increasing positive behavioral changes in people, and therefore reducing available breeding sites for mosquitoes. The Embodied Games Lab in Psychology at Arizona State University created an educational game phone app using machine learning to teach students how to identify and eliminate mosquito breeding sites. Skeeter Breeder is an interactive, educational game that teaches participants about potential mosquito breeding sites and how to eliminate them from the immediate environment as documented by smartphone imagery. Currently, there is no educational game phone app that uses machine learning to teach this topic. This Thesis describes a pilot study focused on educating about common mosquito breeding sites and increasing the knowledge of 5th graders on the topic through an agentic (by taking their own pictures), engaging (game-like platform with rewards), and interactive (receiving immediate feedback on pictures) game developed from scratch at ASU.