David Tinapple

Prior to studying studio art at Carnegie Mellon, David Tinapple worked in “Cognitive Engineering,” a branch of interface design focused on finding ways to support human cognition, coordination, and performance in complex task domains (intelligence analysis, command and control, health care, human robot coordination).

Today Tinapple’s core research questions still look at the complex cognitive strategies employed by people at the intersection of technology and work, but the focus has shifted towards designing better tools and systems for teaching and learning. Tinapple uses his classrooms as a natural lab in which new ideas, strategies, and tools can be tested.

Tinapple is part of the team responsible for the design of the Digital Culture degree, a new experimental undergraduate degree program at ASU that aims to bridge the technical and creative mindset, teaching new combinations of skills while using new teaching tools and practices in the classroom.

Tinapple is designer and co-creator (with Professor Loren Olson) of CritViz.com, an online tool for teachers and students, designed to support peer-review and critique in classrooms. CritViz started as an experiment in scaling up the traditional art school “crit” to larger sized classrooms (50-100 students), but quickly gained popularity and is now the center of a research project and a startup company. CritViz allows teachers facilitate large scale formative peer review sessions in which students critique, rank, and rate each others work. This goes beyond “peer grading,” towards classroom self-curation, and a search for ways to change the cognitive framework and incentive structure in today’s classrooms. MOOCs are interesting but this research is primarily concerned with the face-to-face classroom, and scaling up the levels of engagement. Why can’t “bigger is better” apply to the classroom?