Hi there…
…and thanks for visiting my digital workspace! Grab your favorite cozy beverage and take look around.
About Ada
Centering humanistic values, Ada facilitates online and in-person learning experiences that bridge creativity, STEM equity, multi-sensory cues, and micro-cultural differences. These experiences build robust community structures for educators, facilitators, and learners as participants in knowledge-creation.
In the past decade, Ada designed informal STEM education experiences for librarians, graduate students, faculty, educators, youth, and families to connect and learn as cozy communities. In these spaces, she cultivates learners’ confidence and curiosity to bring their own interests and cultural backgrounds into the learning environment.
Ada’s expertise in education innovation draws from her 17 years of multimodal gesture research, and a lifelong interest in human-centered multimedia design and communication.
ProjectsCreations✨Sparks for future work
- Experienced in scaling up for national reach through brand design, content strategy, and user journeys
- Adept at coordinating buy-in across multiple internal departments for collaborative work to achieve independent goals
- Creativity-inspired community event planning that weaves big picture values and aspirations with detailed logistics of elevating shared interests
💌 Ways to connect
If you’re looking at this website, we met online or in-person.
- What in the world is creative epistemology, Ada?
- How do I scale my education work to a national level?
- What goes into the design thinking behind the kits you send to librarians?
- What are some low cost and high impact ways to start or grow a community of practice?
Ada Ren-Mitchell, Creative Epistemologist, is currently the project lead for the MIT Public Library Innovation Exchange (PLIX). She supports her local arts community as a board member of the Somerville Arts Council.
Professional Work
Weaving together brand content strategy, technical multimedia skillset, STEM inquiry, and computational thinking, Ada believes in embedding humanistic values into her varied work in communicating scientific research, education innovations, and creative metacognition.
This publication design for a white paper elevates and visualizes the ideas of innovative leaders in education on what an affordable education institution can look like
Growing this program to deep national reach, Ada builds capacity for public library professionals to grow STEM expertise through education pedagogies, frameworks, and STEAM activities.
Directing and video production to showcase an NSF project on the experiences of Native STEM students and professionals, highlighting the supports and barriers to their STEM identities. This video won a Presenter’s Choice Award. 🏅
Part of an international collaboration on a new gesture annotation system, Ada advised and guided the development of an online education program to train early- and mid-career researchers on research methods
The Institute for Meta-Synthesis provides a variety of entry points for graduate students and faculty interested in qualitative meta-synthesis research
Low-tech STEAM activities and web design for supporting math and computer science learning at home
A guided museum experience for middle schoolers to develop systems thinking and data literacy
Using a combination of programming languages and design tools, these exploratory data visualizations help test hypotheses in multimodal gesture research
These visual notes support memory recall of discussion topics and ideas from a 2-day brainstorming workshop
This educational resource supports educators and learners to create gears from free Inkscape software, a desktop CNC machine, and hand-on skills, supporting low-cost STEM making and learning
Educational support for educators and high school students for finding data, avoiding graph pitfall, and growing visual literacy skills to tell narratives through infographics.
Sustainable Craftsmanship
From garment design and construction, to bookbinding, to designing new ideas for note-taking, Ada prefers working with fabric and paper because scraps can be more easily recycled into new projects. By designing interactivity and function into form, creations can become more playful and useful.
