Brighten Jelke

I am a designer based in Chicago with a background in educational applications of virtual reality. In 2023, I completed my Master's in Experience Design from DePaul University. I’ve worked as a naturalist, computer science instructor, and academic technologist, and I’m always looking for opportunities to support educational technology and innovation!

I ask good questions.
I am passionate about helping people learn in efficient and engaging ways. Whether I am guiding visitors through a museum exhibit, helping students debug a coding assignment, or writing an instructional guide, I need to understand the perspective of my audience. This starts with asking the right questions to contextualize user needs.

I design great answers.
My expertise is in communications design which includes user research, content/UX writing, information architecture, instructional design, and conversational design. I organize and present information in a way that is clear, relevant, and useful.

In my free time, I enjoy birdwatching and playing trombone with local music groups. I'm currently volunteering with the Cook County Forest Preserves to collect data regarding nesting bird habitats to guide decision-making about land management.

Check out the links below to find me on other sites, or scroll through to find out more about my work.

Projects

A Just Reality

The project concept is a virtual reality (VR) training tool to fill a gap in essential skills training for law enforcement when investigating gender-based violence incidents. As tech research lead, I made software and hardware recommendations, implemented the VR learning experience, and communicated with stakeholders.

Read more about A Just Reality here

Encoding Communication

As a computer science instructor, I believe that communication is an essential coding skill. However, students often struggle to answer the question "what are you working on?" I designed a study to understand and document factors affecting communication in the online setting and developed recommendations for improvement.

Read more about my coding instruction here

Great Lakes Invasion!

Great Lakes Invasion is a cooperative board game where players work together to limit the spread of invasive sea lampreys in the Great Lakes region while protecting native species. As a game designer, I wrote and tested the instructions, and made sure that the game mechanics aligned with our player learning goals.

Read more about the educational board game here

Writing

Recently I've been doing more content writing. I write educational blog posts for the Chicago Ornithological Society.

• October 10, 2023: World Mental Health Day
• September 15, 2023: Field Trip Report

I also write computer science lessons for Study.com.

• November 12, 2023: Java Interfaces: An Overview

Presentations and Publications

Presentations

• Workshop: Wagner, LeAnne, Lien Tran, Brighten Jelke, and Lynn Baus. “Transformed Reality: Designing for VR to create empathetic essential skill training.” International Conference on Meaningful Play, 2022. [link]


• Poster: Jelke, Brighten, Lien Tran, LeAnne Wagner, and Lynn Baus. “Developing a Trauma-Informed Interviewing Training Module Prototype for Law Enforcement Using Virtual Reality.” Immersive Learning Research Network-Practitioner(2022): 28-31.[link]
  
  

Publications

• Mayer, Sven, Jens Reinhardt, Robin Schweigert, Brighten Jelke, Valentin Schwind, Katrin Wolf, and Niels Henze. “Improving Humans’ Ability to Interpret Deictic Gestures in Virtual Reality.” In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-14. 2020. [link]


• Jackson, Bret, Brighten Jelke, and Gabriel Brown. "Yea Big, Yea High: A 3D User Interface for Surface Selection by Progressive Refinement in Virtual Environments." In 2018 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), pp. 320-326. IEEE, 2018. [link]

Education