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Making with Code

For the last two years, I’ve been designing, teaching, and researching a constructionist computer science curriculum at a secondary school in Hong Kong. The program aims to engage 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.

Computer Science Education

Because of its emphasis on personal motivation, the constructionist computer science course I design and teach offers many opportunities to better understand how students relate to computational literacy. In particular, project-based assessment has allowed us to reconsider the priorities of introductory computer science education. Currently, the team working on the curriculum published a conference paper describing our vision for the course and the research we are performing on the course.

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

Technology and Social Learning

In the time before all learning became online learning, 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.

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.

Reading

I enjoy science fiction, creative nonfiction essays, and generally anything that helps me make sense of this weird and wonderful world. Here's some writing I've enjoyed recently:

  • How To Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

  • "Heirlooms" by Bryan Washington

  • Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

  • The Broken Earth Trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

Cooking

Generally, I like to try to imagine vegetarian versions of the more meaty dishes I grew up eating like pulled pork. However, during the pandemic I got really into perfecting staples like bread, stew, and pickled goods. Here are some of the things I've cooked a lot in the last year:

Listening

Judging by my Spotify Unwrapped stats, I leaned heavily (maybe a little too much so) on auditory experiences to get me through 2020. These are some of the podcasts and albums I kept returning to: