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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $750,000 grant to UC Berkeley professors Niloufar Salehi and Catherine Albiston and University of Southern California professor Afshin Nikzad to support efforts by the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to implement a new elementary school zone-based student assignment policy.

The Berkeley team will partner with SFUSD on an iterative, human-centered design process to understand families’ needs for student assignment through interviews and analysis of existing data. Using these findings, the team will develop and conduct a community engagement process to involve families directly in the design of elementary zones.

I School professor Morgan G. Ames has been awarded the 2021 Computer History Museum Prize for her book The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop per Child.

The Computer History Museum Prize, awarded by SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society, is awarded to the author of an outstanding book published during the prior three years in the history of computing, broadly conceived.

“The Charisma Machine impressed the judges for both the clarity of its writing and its superlative scholarly achievement,” the awards committee stated.