Boulder Retreat 2023

May 1-3, 2023 

A convergence research retreat. The opportunities for the future of inclusive educational technologies are multifaceted, requiring deep and convergent knowledge across the entire education and technology ecosystem:

• Software Development & Engineering. Exploring novel frameworks for information packaging, flow, and communication across diverse modalities. Investigation of the human capacity for sensing and expression. Novel and bespoke devices interfacing with humans and technologies.

• Human-centered Computing. Exploring and re-envisioning connections between learners, content, and materials.

• Education & Philosophy of Computing. Envisioning new paradigms, connecting previously disparate solutions, provoking new outlooks.

• Cognitive Science & Learning Science. Developing new connections between foundational STEM concepts, and the contexts, materials, and supports needed to make these salient.

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Belonging. Centering learners across cultural, linguistic, sensory, mobility, and cognitive differences, to advance a growing avenue of research that puts diversity at the center of technology design.

Researchers and technologists across disciplines gathered in Boulder Colorado for a three-day retreat. Through collective exploration and analysis of exploratory learning tools, we surfaced the differing interests and expertise of the group. From there, we engaged in playful creating, knowledge sharing, utilizing experiential prototypes of embodied interfaces and other experiences, including co-created ones. Through shared experiences of analysis and making, we identified opportunities for future convergence research. Together, we contributed to the advancement of education that is equitable and embodied, inclusive and intuitive, scalable and sustainable, supported by open and extensible software.