I am a Learning Science and HCI researcher with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon’s HCI Institute. I am extremely passionate about low-resourced communities, and how cost-effective and accessible technologies can be used to improve the quality of formal and informal education they receive. My dissertation research was focused on how to design technologies that foster help-seeking for K-3 students in rural villages in Tanzania.
As a passion project, I review children’s storybooks that celebrate African history and culture.
I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher with CMU’s National Robotics and Engineering Center working with Ross Higashi and Jessica Hammer on a project called Player-Programmed Partner Games (P3G) for Low-Resource Learners. The goal of our project is to help kids understand how players and player-programmed robots can work together to accomplish in-game goals. We’re doing this by developing a new genre of game: player-programmed partner games, or P3G, where the player both plays the game as an avatar and also programs a robot collaborator to work with them. The overall aim is to increase computational thinking and coding skills among low income and marginalized youth in the United States.
