28 Fulbright Taiwan Educators Came to See What Students Can Build

This morning, we opened our doors to 28 higher education educators from Fulbright Taiwan — and it was exactly the kind of visit that reminds us why this work matters.

The group came to explore how we approach student-led innovation at Next Lab and what it looks like to build with emerging technologies in real-world contexts. They didn’t just hear about it. They saw it firsthand, spending time with projects created by our Next Lab Associates across AI, virtual reality, and game technologies.

Watching students walk visitors through their own work — explaining the decisions they made, the problems they were solving, the communities they were building for — is something we never take for granted. That’s the lab working as intended.

A visit that crossed languages and cultures

What made this morning especially meaningful was how our team showed up to make it work.

Student lead Annie Cheng and team member Kelly Mukherjee facilitated conversations in Taiwanese throughout the visit, while Amanda Federico provided support in Mandarin. The result was a room where ideas could move freely across languages — where a student in Phoenix could explain their EdgeAI prototype to an educator in Taipei’s higher education system, and both sides could actually hear each other.

That kind of cultural and linguistic fluency doesn’t happen by accident. We’re proud of the team for making it possible.

Thank you to Fluent Futures Lab

This visit came together through the work of Dr. Emilia Gracia from Fluent Futures Lab, whose effort in making the connection and coordinating the visit we genuinely appreciate. Partnerships like this one — built on shared commitment to education, technology, and the future of learning — are how Next Lab extends its reach beyond the Tempe campus.

We’re grateful for the opportunity to host, and we look forward to continuing these conversations. International perspectives sharpen our thinking and remind us that the questions we’re working on here are being asked everywhere.

The conversation continues

If you’re an institution, delegation, or educational leader interested in visiting Next Lab or exploring what a partnership might look like, we’d love to hear from you.

The students are building. Come see it.

Next Lab is ASU’s applied AI and innovation lab, housed within ASU Enterprise Technology. Our student guilds work across EdgeAI, digital storytelling, applied AI infrastructure, UX research, and games and spatial computing.