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Qualitative Research Methods in Education

My current PhD research focuses on developing and applying qualitative research methodologies to understand how learning experiences shape learners' perspectives. This work bridges educational research and anthropological methods to examine the socio-cultural dimensions of learning about computing.

  • Epistemology in Practice: Exploring Standards of Quality in Qualitative Education Research (forethcoming)

Constructionism and Computational Identity

Based on my time as a high school CS teacher, this research explores how constructionist learning environments support students in developing computational identities.

  • Constructing Computational Identities: Exploring Constructionism and Identity in an Introductory High School Computer Science Course (paper)

  • “Growing as a person”: Authoring Identity Across Formal CS Education and Everyday Computing Contexts (paper)

  • Recovering Constructionism in Computer Science: Design of a Ninth-grade Introductory Computer Science Course (paper)

Technology and Social Learning

For my undergraduate honors thesis, I was curious about how technological mediation impacted the social dimensions of learning. Following this curiosity, I interviewed students attending an elite online university to try to understand technology's effect on their social learning environment. These interviews formed the basis of my senior honor's thesis exploring the impacts of technologically-mediated social scripting in online learning environments.

  • Scripting Social Learning: Investigating Students' Perceptions of Social Constructivist Learning in Minerva's Online Learning Environment (thesis)

Computing & Identity

As part of a course exploring the practical skills and theoretical frameworks of learning technology design, I was curious about the way children learn about identity. With a team of other students, I developed and researched a construction kit integrating the expressive nature of clothing with the computational power of e-textiles.

  • Patchwork: An Expressive E-Textile Construction Kit (paper)

Making with Code

I designed, taught, and researched a constructionist computer science curriculum at a secondary school in Hong Kong. The program engaged grade 9 and grade 10 students with a breadth of topics in computer science through personally-meaningful projects.

Evaluating EdTech

After taking a class about designing education technologies, my friend Jenny Han and I decided that we needed a more solid framework to evaluate the impact edtech had on students and society. So, we designed and led a seminar investigating the intersection of our technical education and learning philosophies/frameworks like critical pedagogy, constructivism, behaviorism, and social reconstructionism.

Blessings

As 2020 ended, I built a web app to share blessings for 2021 with the people I care about. There is often an urgency around learning computational skills and concepts in order to generate economic value through scale. However, with this project I wanted to see what other forms of value (social, spiritual, emotional, etc.) I could produce by focusing on building something for a small, personally-meaningful group of people.

Interneditor

As part of the Tactical Internet Collective, I am working to reimagine the ways we conceptualize and interact with the internet. In our first major project, we are building a browser extension that allows you to make persistent edits to the web pages you visit. In doing so, we hope to diminish the divide between a user and a creator on the internet.

The Sky When You Were Born

In response to the challenges posed by distance and differing time zones, I've been creating digital experiences to share with friends during momentous occasions like birthdays or graduation. This project aggregates all of the photos from Flickr taken on a particular day and tagged with 'sky' (or any other tag you put in the url parameters). You can try it out for yourself by changing the date/tag in the url with date format mmddyyyy.

Reading

Here's some writing I've enjoyed recently:

  • 2666 by Robert Bolaño

  • "Heirlooms" by Bryan Washington

  • Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Cooking

Here are some things I've cooked a lot in the past year:

Listening

These are some of the podcasts and albums I keep returning to: