Allen School Ph.D. student Vicente Arroyos, Allen School professor Leilani Battle and Allen School Ph.D. student Kyle Johnson accept the SIGCHI Special Recognition for AVELA’s mentorship program.
University of Washington student group AVELA – A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access is making STEM education more accessible to more students. The organization provides free courses and workshops for kindergarten to high school students in topics such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and robotics, while pairing learners with college, graduate and professional mentors.
At the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2026) in April, AVELA co-founders and Allen School Ph.D students Vicente Arroyos and Kyle Johnson received a SIGCHI Special Recognition “for building an impactful mentorship ecosystem that empowers thousands of underrepresented youth and strengthens community-rooted STEM learning and workforce development.”
We recently spoke with Arroyos and Johnson to learn more about AVELA and their work.
What is AVELA?
