Tugce Aldemir is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Learning, Design and Technology Program in the College of Education at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also a graduate research assistant in the Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT) at the Pennsylvania State University. She has received her M.S. in the Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Her research interests are: computer-supported collaborative learning, socio-emotional interaction and regulation in collaborative learning environments, socio-metacognition, human computer interaction, emotionally responsive online learning environments, and cultural competence and collaborative discussions. Her PhD dissertation focuses on developing a new model of socio-emotional competence to inform metacognitive and socio-metacognitive expertise or modify the existing model of competence to broaden its scope to entail socio-emotional interactional patterns. Her previous work has centered around a diverse group of topics including online learning, learner-based UX design, gamification, game theories, and learning experience design for empathy and social connectedness, and she has co-authored in the journal articles and conference proceedings about these topics.