Prajakt Pande

Prajakt is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning and is affiliated with SMU’s Technology-enhanced Immersive Learning Cluster (TEIL). He also holds a Research Associate position at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Prajakt earned his Ph. D. from the Learning Sciences Research Group at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai.

Prajakt specializes in the convergence of embodied cognition, technology-enhanced learning, and STEM education. His research focuses on two main highly interdisciplinary aspects. Firstly, he develops and evaluates innovative technology interfaces, such as immersive virtual reality (iVR), to facilitate embodied learning of scientific concepts and phenomena. Secondly, he characterizes learning processes through the lens of embodiment by examining mechanisms of cognition and action (such as bodily interaction with scientific models and representations). To pursue this two-fold research, Prajakt employs iterative design-based research models, and a combination of techniques such as qualitative interviewing, interaction analysis, and eye-tracking. His research contributes to both the theory of learning and educational practice.

Before joining SMU, Prajakt served as the Science Education Design Lead at the Molecule Maker Lab Institute, an NSF-funded AI institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to that, he led research on the design and use of iVR for science learning at Roskilde University, Denmark, as a postdoctoral researcher.

Prajakt co-chairs Embodied@ICCE, an annual International Workshop on Embodied Learning: Technology Design, Analytics, and Practices, in collaboration with colleagues from Japan, Switzerland, and India. This workshop takes place in conjunction with the International Conference on Computers in Education. He has traveled extensively across Asia, Europe, and the United States for research purposes and has been invited to speak about his research at multiple local as well as international venues in recent years.

Recent Publications

Pande, P. & Jepsen, P. M. (forthcoming) Lab Safety Goes Immersive: An ecological study with gender analyses comparing the learning outcomes of iVR, desktop, and text-heavy instruction.

Pande, P. & Chandrasekharan, S. (2022). Expertise as Sensorimotor Tuning: Perceptual Navigation Patterns Mark Representational Competence in Science, Research in Science Education, 52, 725-747,https://doi.org/10.1007/s11165-020-09981-3.

Pande, P., Thit, A., Sørensen, A. E., Mojsoska, B., Moeller, M. E., & Jepsen, P. M. (2021). Longitudinal Effectiveness of Immersive VR Simulations and their Video Playbacks for Undergraduate Learning: Lessons from a media comparison study. Research in Learning Technology, 2021 (29), [2482]. https://doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v29.2482.

Mishra S., Majumdar R., Kothiyal A., Pande P., Warriem J.M. (2021) Tracing Embodied Narratives of Critical Thinking. In: Roll I., McNamara D., Sosnovsky S., Luckin R., Dimitrova V. (eds) Artificial Intelligence in Education. AIED 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12749. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78270-2_48.

Pande, P. (2020). Learning and Expertise with Scientific External Representations: An Embodied and Extended Cognition Model, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, (20), 463-482. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09686-y.

Mishra, S., Majumdar, R., Kothiyal, A., Pande, P., & Warriem, J. M., (2020). ENaCT: An Action-based Framework for the Learning and Analytics of Critical Thinking, In So, H. J. et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computers in Education, 2, 144-153. Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education, Darwin-Australia.

Andreasen, N., Baceviciute, S., Pande, P., & Makransky, G., (2019). Virtual reality followed by enactment can increase procedural knowledge in a science lesson, In Proceedings of the 26th IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, 840-841. IEEE: Osaka, Japan. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2019.8797755.

Pande, P., & Chandrasekharan, S. (2017). Representational competence: towards a distributed and embodied cognition account, Studies in Science Education, 53(1), 1-43. UK: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057267.2017.1248627.