Congratulations to Dr Marissa Bond on publishing ‘Teaching Skills with Virtual Humans‘, based on Marissa’s PhD research, where she developed software that used virtual people to help children understand and practice social communication skills.

Marissa has been an incredible contributor to Flinders University, through a career of tutoring, demonstrating, student recruitment and a qualified primary school teacher.

Marissa is now Head of Education Technology at Lumination where she looks after both the software development and education teams.

‘In both teams we have a strong focus on extended reality (VR/AR) technologies and other future technologies (robotics/drones) – developing bespoke applications for clients, and supporting students and teachers to use these technologies effectively in the classroom and create their own immersive experiences. We have just released our first in-house app LeadMe Edu to help teachers manage and effectively use class sets of Android devices (such as those used in handheld VR headsets), we have ongoing projects with the Department for Education SA, Catholic Education SA, Department of Education NSW and others, and we also work directly with a wide range of local schools, where we run excursion and incursion programs, remote learning, and teacher professional development events. (As a company we do a lot more than this, these are just the bits I’m specifically involved in!)’