The ISEA (Innovation Science for Education Analytics) program is a data science training program, specialized in applying artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques in educational research and technology development. The program is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), and offered by a collaboration among faculty from the UW College of Education, the UW eScience Institute, and other higher education institutions including the University of Oregon, the University of Maryland, and Vanderbilt University.
Why Summer Hackweek project?
The Hackweek brings together ISEA fellows and faculty members to use data analytics, software design and development, and research skills to tackle real-world educational issues. Within one week and working full-time as teams, fellows will complete or make significant progress on the sponsors’ projects under the sponsors’ guidance and the faculty’s support. For projects that cannot be completed within the Hackweek time, they will continue to work on them after the Hackweek. Products and findings will be presented at the Fall Virtual conference. Their participation in sponsors’ project will be free of charge to sponsors, unless that the scope of the work of the projects exceeds significantly beyond the original Hackweek’s design and needs substantial more time and efforts from the fellows.
Due Date: May 31st, 2024.
Benefits to Sponsors
No Fee
The IES—a federal funding agency—provides basic funding for fellows. Their participation in sponsors’ project will be free of charge to sponsors, unless that the scope of the work of the projects exceeds significantly beyond the original Hackweek’s design and needs substantial more time and efforts from the fellows.
Creative problem-solving
A team of 3-5 highly skillful and professional fellows will design and build innovative solutions.
Brand recognition
Boost public awareness of your organization through fellow’s engagement and partnerships with UW and IES.
Meaningful engagement
Customized opportunities to assess fellow talent and recruit for jobs.
Commercial licenses
Sponsor will have commercial licenses for any IP developed through the projects. Fellows will have the rights to present or publish the work in collaboration with the sponsor.
What are good Hackweek projects?
- Scoped for a small team of students (3-5 fellows) to complete within a short period of time;
- Primarily self-contained, although might be integrated within a larger context;
- Contains design, analytic, or development phases, culminating in a specific project outcome;
- Reflects lower-priority real-world problems faced by your organization or your project.
Who are the Fellows?
- U.S. citizens or permanent residents;
- Top-notch graduate students, data analysts or other professional researchers in K-12 systems and research organization, and software engineers and program managers from tech companies.
What have fellows learned in the ISEA program by the time of Hackweek?
- Software design,
- Learning theories, nudging, and K-12 instructional frameworks,
- Machine learning (prediction),
- Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods: topic modeling, supervised learning, and transformer models,
- Prompt engineering using large language models (LLMs),
- Model performance evaluation and human feedback data collection,
- Retrieval augmented generation (RAG),
- Recommender system,
- NLP applications for instructional task analysis and teacher feedback,
- Causal inference (experimental design, quasi-experimental design),
- Economic evaluation (cost-effectiveness and cost-benefit analysis) of educational technology applications,
- Data ethics.