Henry Fan

I support the software that lets California community college students take classes across 116 campuses as if they were at one — and I'm learning to do research on how those students learn math and CS. A mentee, not a lab director.

Role

Application Support Analyst I

Team

California Virtual Campus — Online Education Initiative (CVC-OEI)

Institution

Foothill–De Anza Community College District

Research mentor

Jeff Anderson (Foothill College)

Goal

PhD in CS education

What I work on

By day, I'm on the CVC-OEI support team. Four student information systems, dozens of campuses, one cross-enrollment seam. The job lives at the intersection of data reconciliation and student experience — when a transfer record fails silently, a student's spring schedule breaks. That's the bug I care about.

The rest of my time goes into a research program I call The Modeling Bench. It's three first-author papers written in close collaboration with Jeff Anderson, all deliberately extending written invitations from his published work in PRIMUS.

• Paper 01
  Hands-on lab kit for eigenvalue intuition
  Physical coupled-oscillator kit that makes resonance legible before the algebra — extending Anderson (PRIMUS 2018).
• Paper 02
  AI tutoring without losing the lab
  How to put an LLM in a math classroom without collapsing the part where students struggle productively.
• Paper 03
  Anti-racist learner-centered objectives, in practice
  Translating Anderson's 2024 PRIMUS framework into concrete lab-week objectives and rubrics.

What this site is

Compound — the root URL — is my personal daily-driver dashboard. It's password-gated because it holds live task state. The public doorways are this page, the research lab, the project launchpad, and the focus playbook. Everything is hand-written HTML, deployed via GitHub Pages, and intentionally built in public so my mentor can see the work accumulating.