- [Announcer] Funding for the Secret Life of Scientists is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
(intense mechanical music) (mechanical music) - I'm an engineer who loves education.
And I get to work with kids and design learning environments and technologies that go into those learning environments to help kids to build stories, to do role playing and all of these different types of things, so the kids can learn about their emotions, the emotions of others, so that they can discuss it and so that they can learn how to work together in the future.
(mechanical music) (intense mechanical music) (mechanical music) When I was little, my cousins and I, we formed this performance group.
We called ourselves the TMs for too much.
♪ We're the Tms ♪ ♪ Dicky and Shauny ♪ And we'd always have a magic performance and then we'd have a dance performance.
That's probably where all of this began.
The dance team at Florida State was the Golden Girls.
Anytime I had a Golden Girl shirt on, people thought I was talking about the television show.
But we would do halftime for basketball games, homecoming.
We did a lot of national competitions.
We didn't stop smoking commercial or a don't start smoking commercial.
As soon as I got into college, I was immediately bombarded with major courses, so I'd always have my book with me.
I'd walk into practice and I'd literally be stretching trying to read my math homework.
Then they're like, "Shauny, what is your problem?"
I'm like, I have so much work to do.
Like if you had this much work to do, you'd be doing this too.
I'm sure most people thought I was a big nerd.
Five years later, I come to MIT and I join the dance troupe, and I go into the theater where everybody's getting changed.
And I walk in the room with my book, kind of ready to hear the ridicule and I look up and every single person in there has either a laptop or a book and I'm like I found home.
Everybody understands me here.
(mechanical music) (intense mechanical music) (mechanical music) So many of my projects have involved emotion because for a long time I didn't really get emotion.
My mother describes my temperament as just flat line.
She would have a surprise birthday party for me and I would go, thanks mom.
And she said it always hurt her feelings because she thought that I wasn't excited, but it's just that I just, I didn't emote.
As far as products that I've developed.
The thing that I kept coming across was how our emotions can either impede or enhance learning.
So, I was like, wow, I have this great dream of developing these awesome technology infused environments for kids, but if they have stuff going on on the inside that impact what's happening in the classroom, it's really not gonna matter.
So, I was like, man, well, what can I do?
How can I help kids using technologies that can sense emotion in different ways to appropriately sense and respond to their own emotions?
So the GIRLS software, it stood for girls involved in real life sharing.
And the idea was the girls would go in, they would think of a story, they would make a scene, they would have text associated, kind of like a comic book, and then the tool that I built would look at their text and try to figure out what emotion was being expressed in the text and say, wow, that must have made you feel happy to which they'd be like, wow, you know, it's a computer.
How'd the computer know?
That's pretty cool.
I was trying to get girls to reflect on their emotions.
With the hopes that being able to reflect on emotions in this way would help them to deal with them in other situations.
The thought that I could build something that could help someone understand themselves better.
For me, that's just what it's all about.
That's why I do what I do.
(mechanical music) (intense mechanical music) (mechanical music) (foreboding music) Yes.
MacGyver.
- All right MacGyver, think.
- I mean, you have a stick of gum and a toothpick and you save the world.
How is he not the coolest ever?
(foreboding music) Oh, Michael Jackson completely.
King of pop.
Although Prince, you know.
(gentle music) James Comer, he's from the Yale School Development Program and they've had some great results helping kids out.
(gentle music) (upbeat music) Tap, because I can fake it.
(gentle music) My mother, there was no person that she would ever hesitate to help.
(gentle music) Ballet, because in ballet you're supposed to tuck your behind and mine doesn't tuck.
(gentle music) Do I have to say?
Poop.
(Shaundra laughs) Engineers man, we got a rule.
(Shaundra laughs) (mechanical music)
