The Learning Chameleon, Inc.
The Learning Chameleon, Inc. has been a worldwide leader in developing models of how students develop 21st century problem solving skills. The company's IMMEX™ software assisted learning in more than 150,000 students in classrooms internationally by integrating these multimedia simulations into a unique web-based learning platform for modeling strategic thinking and problem solving. These models help teachers teach, students learn, and administrators make informed educational decisions through the continual, and real-time evaluation problem solving progress. We accomplish this by leveraging existing proprietary libraries of tasks, data sets and advance intelligence-derived performance models, and then extending them with cutting-edge technologies such as second-by-second Cognitive Electrophysiology models. During the past several years The Learning Chameleon, Inc. has applied these technologies and developed Team NeuroDynamics.
While most people can recognize if a team is in the groove or out of synch, it is more difficult to predict when changes in the state will occur, yet having this ability would be important for dynamically adapting team performance. If we can predict when a team is going out of synch, we can provide real-time feedback to help prevent performance errors, lapses in communication or lapses in attention. From the perspective of complexity science, teams can be thought of as self-organized flows of information spanning biological processes and broader behavioral activities. As team members interact, there are information flows, often turbulent, that organize periodically around a common goal only to change form again as the task and environment evolve. Our research seeks to determine how these information flows can be quantified and tracked at multiple levels as teams develop expertise. This approach is applicable to all forms of teams and has been empirically validated with US Navy submarine navigation teams, entrepreneurial teams, high school problem solvers, as well as healthcare teams. In this way the company, like its name sake successfully blends within and across educational, training and assessment environments.
Ron Stevens
Farewell professor Emeritus Ron Stevens, our founder, 3 Dec 1946 - 7 Feb 2023. company CEO, research partner, husband, brother and an extraordinarily beautiful friend. Just a great man. His pioneering work in group and team neurodynamics will go on.
Dr. Stevens received his PhD. In Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University. He is currently a Professor (Emeritus), UCLA School of Medicine, a member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute, and the CEO of The Learning Chameleon, Inc.. He has published over 200 peer-reviewed studies in medical research, medical problem solving and team neurodynamics and is the author of three patents.
Dr. Stevens early studies focused on the cellular and molecular defects in autoimmunity and immune deficiency, and included pioneering studies on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (before it was termed AIDS). Subsequently he developed of the technology-based UCLA-IMMEX™ problem-authoring and solving project. Funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education, this project has engaged hundreds of teachers and tens of thousands of students, from middle school through medical school in scientific problem solving activities. This project was recognized by the Smithsonian Institute in its ‘Search for New Hero’s’ program, by Zenith Corporation’s ‘Masters of Innovation’ program and by the UCLA Medical School’s ‘Excellence in Education’ award. The software has been licensed for commercial development.
In his role as the CEO of The Learning Chameleon, Inc., his recent research focused on using EEG-derived measures to investigate team neurodynamics in the complex and real-world settings of military and healthcare training. Dr. Stevens’ research was the first to demonstrate the presence of neurodynamic organizations in teams. These are states of neurodynamic persistence that team members enter into when their rhythm can no longer support the complexity of the task and they must expend energy to re-organize into structures that better minimize the ‘surprise’ in the environment. These studies are leading to quantitative teamwork models showing how teams cognitively organize in response to environmental and task changes, and are paving the way for future real-time individual and team adaptive learning. The studies have been recognized by multiple awards from the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society’s Augmented Cognition Group including the Admiral Leland Kollmorgen ‘Spirit of Innovation Award.’ This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, Office of Naval Research, Department of Education, as well as corporate and private funding.
trysha galloway
Trysha is the director of research for The Learning Chameleon/IMMEX™ laboratory and co-author of dozens of peer reviewed publications. As team processes are difficult to separate from those of individual team members due to the lack of quantitative measures that can be applied to both process sets. Her Cognitive Electrophysiological research interests blend the population based advantages of probabilistic performance modeling with the detection of neurophysiologic signals to help personalize/accelerate the individual and team learning processes as well as to construct models of teamwork illustrating cognitive organization patterns in complex education and training activities as diverse as Submarine Piloting and Navigation by Navy teams, High School problem solving and Healthcare teams.
