The man behind the magpie
Dr Andrew Zamecnik, Early Career Researcher, C3L, School of Education, Adelaide University
I build tools that give teachers their time back. Hours of squinting at group work become evidence teachers can see, defend and act on, during the lesson, not weeks later.
MagpieMatrix is built from the ground up, by hand: the devices on the tables, the cloud infrastructure behind them, the analytics, the AI agents. Every layer, ins and outs, has passed through my hands. That range comes from the road here: a bachelor’s in IT, years spent building systems like this across other domains, and then a PhD that pointed the whole toolkit at education. A human Swiss-army knife, in the service of teachers.
For schools, that means AI validated against human judgement, an auditable trail behind every mandated capability, and setup that takes minutes. Everything is trialled in real classrooms, under real noise, with real teachers calling the shots.
Next: proving it at scale, classroom validation across South Australia, then a national program testing whether this evidence actually changes how teams learn and how teachers teach.
The magpie and the matrix: how it got its name
Not long after Andrew moved house, the front garden came with regular visitors: a group of Australian magpies, social, curious, clever, always looking after one another. The parallel with a strong classroom team was hard to miss.
That idea named the prototype built at C3L, Adelaide University. The magpies are the groups; the matrix is the system beneath them, revealing the human skills emerging within each.
Human skills. Not bird skills.
Black and white plumage. A chestnut-red eye. One of the only animals that knows its own reflection. The bird behind the name
0 peer-reviewed publications
0 citations
0 h-index
0 papers in Scopus top 1% in education
Metrics from Google Scholar and Scopus, last updated July 2026.
The flight path: how a question became a platform
None of this happened yesterday. The problem was picked years before AI could touch it. AI just made the impossible possible.
2019–23 The PhD years, UniSA
The question before the tools
Why do some teams gel while others fall apart, and why can nobody see it happening? A PhD on the behavioural side of task cohesion in technology-mediated learning starts pulling the thread.
The Team Analytics dashboard (Computers & Education, 2022) puts team behaviour in front of teachers, co-designed with K-12 schools — and starts a research network that keeps growing. Then the methods take shape publication by publication: systematic review, learner trace data, task-cohesion perceptions, three of them landing in the Scopus top 1% for education.
temporal interaction motifs, from the method papers
2024 Early Career Researcher, C3L Adelaide University
MagpieMatrix is born
An early-career research post at Adelaide University turns years of method into a working prototype: a passive device on every table, no screens, evidence in real time.
the magpiematrix devices
2025 CSIRO On Prime · CRUXES
The problem chose the product
Forty-two stakeholder interviews: teachers, parents, regulators, policymakers. The need is real and worldwide: schools cannot surface human skills: leadership, trust, psychological safety, well-being, collaborative problem-solving. Time to take the research into practice.
research.csiro.au · ON Prime alumni ↗
2023–25 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Credentialing lifelong human skills
Two years with industry experts, designing and building the Learner Information Framework: learner-credentialing infrastructure that captures lifelong human skills. Work that took the research to the foundation’s Seattle HQ.
learnerinfoframework.org ↗
2025 Microsoft AFMR · A$24,000 award
AI makes the impossible possible
The problem predates the tools by a decade. Then LLMs arrive, and Microsoft’s Accelerating Foundation Models Research award, a competitive global program, builds them (and soon, AI agents) into MagpieMatrix, transforming its speed and reliability.
watch · promoting & assessing human skills with GenAI ↗
Late 2025 Well-being hackathon
Well-being, surfaced
At an Adelaide University hackathon, MagpieMatrix is put to a new test: surfacing well-being indicators and relationships from team dialogue. It also supported the work of Equilibria, a student well-being project. Paper coming soon.
the well-being hackathon · late 2025
2026 Trust in AI teammates
What it takes to trust an AI agent
A scoping review of trust antecedents in human-AI teaming (Artificial Intelligence Review), alongside workshops at LAK and AIED, from CrossMMLA to Human-AI Teaming.
AIED 2025
LAK 2024
2026 SA schools & the Netherlands
In classrooms, and growing
MagpieMatrix is heading into schools across South Australia (supporting C3L colleagues on creativity and human-AI collaboration research) while collaborators actively test and develop it in the Netherlands. Next: the pros and cons of contextual AI agents for surfacing learning in dialogue, written with C3L colleagues.
authentic collaborative learning · with C3L
July 2026 EBSS Research Centres Showcase, Adelaide University
The magpies meet the campus
C3L took a stall as one of eleven research centres at the College of Education, Behavioural and Social Sciences showcase in Union House. Staff and students picked the magpies up, saw what they capture live on the table, and asked the people who built them.
the C3L stall · EBSS research centres showcase, July 2026
Let’s make collaboration visible, together
Schools, researchers, industry partners: if surfacing collaborative skills matters to you, it matters to us.