Influential Woman · Education Technology Research

Anastasia Wolf

User Experience Researcher, Frog Street

Seattle, WA

Certifications · Degrees · Memberships

Degree Bachelor of Science in Social Psychology Degree UC San Diego Degree Master's of Science in Human-Centered Design and Engineering Degree University of Washington

Her Story

About Anastasia

My career path has been twisty and turny, but it's led me exactly where I'm meant to be. When I was in college, I wanted to go into children's psychiatric health, so my first job out of college was being a behavioral technician in classrooms working with kids with behavioral difficulties, motor difficulties, and verbal difficulties - really anywhere where a kid might need a little bit of extra help. While working in classrooms, I discovered that children's technology kind of sucks - it's really bad. I did a little bit of accessible design and research at my job, and I decided I actually wanted to do that full-time. After getting my master's degree in human-centered design and engineering, where I was active in doing research with children as part of university lab partnerships, I landed my first job at Age of Learning working on ABC Mouse, one of the major educational gaming platforms for kids used by over 10 million kids in early childhood ages 2 to 8. I also worked on Adventure Academy, which is a massively multiplayer online game for kids ages 8 to 13 - it's the first to market MMO for that age range, which is really cool. Recently, I left and I'm now a user experience researcher at Frog Street, where I work on curriculum for children who are infants through pre-K. In my current role, I work cross-functionally with all sorts of departments - I'm embedded on a product team working closely with designers, developers, and anybody who's making the product. My job is to make sure they're building the right thing and it reflects what our users and buyers need. I do everything from floating concept testing to teachers to giving them prototypes and seeing how they use it. I'm all about how you make the next generation happier, healthier human beings - it starts in early childhood.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Anastasia

01What do you attribute your success to?

I would attribute my success to a very supportive family and friends. I also attribute my success to just genuine interest. I think I'm a very lucky person in that I followed what I like to do - kind of follow my heart, you see a problem, and you just do your best to try and solve it. That's kind of how I fell into it.

02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?

I would say go with what you're good at. A lot of people say that you should do specific fields because they're 100% guaranteed to get you a job, but that is not really true. I think that if you're in the top 10% of whatever it may be, you will always be fine. So if you're a really good designer, you should be a designer. If you're a really good researcher, you should be a researcher. If you love something, go do it. Don't try and fit as a square peg in a round hole.

03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?

For education technology, one of the things that I'm really curious to see is how artificial intelligence disrupts the education industry. There's a lot of pushback in early childhood education around screening in general, but it's fascinating to think about how it might even impact the lives of the teachers who are teaching kids, and how that works with the greater landscape of curriculum and education technology in the classroom. That's not even to say about how many amazing AI-powered tools there are that are actually facing kids - there are different ways you can use AI. For example, I worked on a project at Age of Learning with an AI chatbot for kids. People are doing all sorts of crazy stuff with it.

04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?

I think probably one of the most important values is honesty. I don't know if ethics could be a value, but since I work so much with kids and families and educators, the things that you do at your job impact the lives of children. So it's really, really important to have really strong ethical standards and make sure that you're building good, well-intentioned products. It's a really tricky thing to kind of balance, you know, selling things and working in a capitalist society with doing good for people's lives, so I think that's a value that I try to go for - honesty and ethics. I also really value determination, as well as adaptability to the world. The world is often changing, and you should be able to change with it.

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