Prof. Bruce M. McLaren is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, head of the McLearn Lab, and past President of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society (2017-2019).  McLaren is passionate about how technology can support education and has dedicated his work and research to projects that explore how students can learn with educational games,  intelligent tutoring systems, e-learning principles, and collaborative learning.  McLaren’s research with digital learning games, for instance, has shown that students can learn decimals better by playing an Internet-based learning game than by using more conventional technology (e.g., IJGBL 2017 paper;  the “Decimal Point” website ).  McLaren’s research with intelligent tutors investigates how students learn when presented with erroneous examples in conjunction with intelligent tutors on the web (See the AdaptErrEx project webpage).  Prof. McLaren has also investigated how erroneous examples can work synergistically with educational games to help students learn.  McLaren has also conducted a series of experiments investigating how chemistry students learn when presented with worked examples, in conjunction with intelligent tutors, as well as polite hints and feedback (See the Stoich studies webpage).  Finally, Prof. McLaren has a keen interest in and experience with collaborative learning and technology for supporting and analyzing collaborative argumentation.  Prof. McLaren has researched and developed educational technology using AI techniques to help teachers moderate collaborative e-Discussions and online arguments (See the projects LASAD, ARGUNAUT, and Metafora).  Prof. McLaren has over 200 publications (42 journal articles) spanning peer-reviewed journals, conferences, workshops, symposiums and book chapters.

Hear from Bruce about his work forming teams and helping them develop products for the edtech industry: Developing EdTech with Purpose: Applying Learning Science to Practice.