Siyu Wu is a Master's graduate in the Instructional Technology and Learning Science Department. Her personal commitment to boosting teaching and learning confidence, creating thriving open learning communities, and promoting equal learning opportunities to all students was rewarded with a Student Association Graduate Enhancement Award in 2022.

Wu credits Dr. Hillary Swanson with introducing her to the concept of computational modeling to support middle school science curricula. Conducting research in the Learning Dynamic Lab gave her experience in programming the computational modeling language and ignited her passion to dive deeper into this area.

As an advocate of involving students in meaningful connections between computational thinking and science learning, Wu has been interested in engaging students in authentic scientific practices through a learning-by-modeling-microworld approach. By creating a computational modeling environment that consciously meets students halfway, she wants to help them develop, test, and debug computational models to better understand scientific phenomena. She aims to show students why computational modeling is useful to them and not as difficult as they may think. She wants to promote computational thinking in the science curriculum, especially to those who do not have access to computer science courses but need to develop computational thinking in their early years. 

Wu will continue her research and study toward a doctoral degree at Pennsylvania State University in the 2022-23 academic year and hopes to bring her passion and experience back to USU in the future.