My Story
I have been helping people to better understand things through my whole life, this led me to start tutoring my peers more than 10 years ago. As a student at the German School Alexander von Humboldt in Mexico City, I started with high-school science and mathematics topics, usually doing a combination of German and Spanish to explain the concepts and formulas to my friends and younger kids. In retrospective, I realize now that that’s how I started to find a vocation in teaching and helping learners to deal with new and complex topics.
Through my undergrad I continued as a private tutor. I expanded my repertoire to cover physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics and prepared students for the German Abitur Exams in sciences and math. Nearing the end of my undergrad, I got the chance to do my social service teaching chemistry and mathematics for open high-school students.
After working in the pharma industry for one year, I started to formally to teach in Spanish at the high-school level at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. This led me to design gamified, narrative platforms to teach biotechnology to last year high-school students. Later on, I taught the bioprocesses laboratory in English at the Undergrad level, where I had create experiment protocols for Biotechnology Engineering Undergraduates. Additionally, I gave a high-school level crash-course in German about analytical geometry and calculus at the Humboldt School.
More recently, I did a Master’s degree at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts & Technology, where I worked for 2+ years on designing activities that activate the theory of SFU IAT201 „Intro to Human-Computer Interaction and Cognition“. I worked with my supervisor, Brian Fisher, in refining and designing materials that led to the first edition of the HCI Broker Laboratory Notebook in 2020. Please feel free to use it and adapt it for your own courses!
Portfolio
The HCI Broker
This Lab Notebook is a self-guided, mostly team-based activity booklet that has 4 Lessons aimed to help HCI learners to create evidence-based design guidelines by applying cognitive science and psychology research. Each Lesson is comprised of an activity that spans over a 3-session period. The topics include sensation, perception, colour, memory, intelligence, affordances, distributed cognition, smart-seeing & projecting.
(Not) Alone in Space 1 & 2
This was my first gamification learning project, I based it on choose-your-own-adventure type of books and on Alien. The goal was for high-school level students to discover and learn about human biology in an abandoned spaceship scenario. I used Google Classroom and Gmail to create an astronaut character that sent missions to the students. Both installment were quite successful and were very liked by students, also these activities were taken on by other teachers from the department.
Bioprocesses Laboratory PBLs
I designed, in collaboration with biotech professionals working in the industry, a set of role-based PBLs meant to address real-life challenges from the industry, and to teach Biotechnology Engineering students how to translate theory to practice.
The Strategist
This series of lessons that spanned over a term, were meant to introduce last-year high-school students to biotechnology and entrepreneuring. Students had team-based, applied tasks on each session where they learned the basics about biotechnology and the industry surrounding it.
Aldo A Barrera Machuca 