About

The Technological Innovations for Inclusive Learning and Teaching (tiilt) Lab aims to improve learning opportunities for students from under-served communities. Our work with technological innovations includes co-designing activities with teachers and learners, creating interfaces that broaden participation in meaningful learning experiences, and developing tools and analytic techniques for studying and supporting complex learning environments. We position our work as inclusive, addressing historic and contemporary disparities in inclusivity and social, racial, and economic inequity.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Data science
• Political Science
• Pedagogy
• Engineering
• Engineering ethics
• Psychology
• Knowledge management
• Management science
• World Wide Web

Selected publications

• SportSense for Data Literacy: Applying Sports and Movement for Authentic and Personal Data Interactions in Elementary Schools

  2026-02-13

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Implementing multimodal learning analytics in authentic settings: A roadmap for ecological impact

  Learning and Instruction · 2026-03-02

  article
  PublisherDOI

• A collaboration literacy analytics framework (CLAF): Investigating students’ perspectives on collaboration quality indicators and feedback utilization

  International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning · 2026-04-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Multimodal learning analytics (MMLA) has improved our understanding of collaboration quality, yet current approaches often overlook students’ perspectives and fail to provide meaningful, student-centered feedback that enhances collaboration literacy. This study addresses these gaps by investigating students’ perspectives on collaboration quality indicators and their feedback utilization preferences. Through an open-ended survey of 290 university students who used a collaboration analytics (CA) tool over 12 weeks of collaborative activities, we identified key individual- and group-level indicators spanning the process, outcome, and review layers. These indicators articulate how learners conceptualize the interplay between individual behaviors, group dynamics, and collaborative outcomes. Additionally, we identified distinct approaches to real-time and post hoc feedback utilization, highlighting their complementary roles in supporting collaboration literacy. Findings led to the development of a conceptual collaboration literacy analytics framework (CLAF) that integrates evaluation metrics, indicator interdependencies, and feedback mechanisms. The framework captures the dynamic relationship between process and outcome measures, connects individual- and group-level indicators, and incorporates review mechanisms as student-driven quality assurance. By guiding future CSCL research and practice, the framework provides an analytical basis for examining collaboration quality and studying how assessment processes and integrated feedback support collaboration literacy.

  PublisherDOI

• StoryBit Boards: Crafting Interactive Narratives in Paper-Based Games with Micro:bits

  2025-09-30

  article

  This Connections proposal outlines a hands-on workshop focused on the design and creation of interactive paper-based board games powered by BBC Micro:bits. Building on successful prior work with making interactive comics with Micro:bits, this session invites participants to explore the intersection of tangible craft, simple electronics, programming, and collaborative storytelling through the medium of board games. Participants will learn to integrate Micro:bit sensors and outputs to create dynamic game mechanics and narrative triggers within their own paper-prototyped games, leveraging pre-cut templates to expedite creation. The workshop aims to foster interdisciplinary skills (STEAM), encourage rapid prototyping, and demonstrate how accessible technology can enhance traditional play experiences, making digital game design principles tangible and approachable for a diverse audience. We seek to connect HCI researchers and practitioners interested in tangible interaction, game design, education, and narrative play.

  PublisherDOI

• Data as an Actor in Collaborative Sensemaking: Balancing the Body, Memory, and the Record

  2025-06-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Ongoing calls for critical data literacy emphasize the importance of designing learning opportunities for youth to build relationships with data as its author and analyst.By generating and interpreting personal and embodied data, learners can develop relational lenses about data to support these types of skills.We apply actor network theory to analyze teen interactions in a summer program on sports technologies, where youth generate, visualize, and interpret their group's personal movement data.We examine youth's arguments about what data visualizations can depict through qualitative coding of their presentations.We notice youth relying on data as an actor within their arguments and mixing the data'a actions with their remembered experiences.As collaborative actors, youth and data engage in social sensemaking with the data.We offer this frame to highlight the plurality of participation across actors.This contributes to our understanding of community data science practices for teaching and learning.We offer this as an analytical lens for researchers and educators to pay attention to, in their designs and implementations of data literacy tools and activities.Specifically, how to notice and help learners explicate the multiple actors with diverse relationships engaged in making sense of data, and how engaging youth in group, embodied data activities enables unique personal and social ways of data interpretations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Youth as Designers of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Technologies: What Do We Know About the Opportunities and Challenges of K-12 Students Creating Their Own Applications?

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  Over the past decade there has been exponential growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) applications moving out of the lab and into the world, impacting everyday lives.To date, most AI/ML and learning research efforts have centered learners as recipients of instruction from, or collaborators with, AI agents.This symposium brings together a group of scholars who will discuss how learners and teachers can engage with AI/ML technologies as creative resources, or CreateAI.CreateAI refers to the use of AI tools and methods for creative expression, that is, involving students not just in using AI for predetermined productive ends, but also as creators who can design and build projects with AI/ML.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Curiosity Portals: Designing Entryways for Tangible Exploration

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Curiosity is a fundamental human drive that propels exploration, discovery, and learning.While extensively studied, a gap remains in understanding how curiosity is sparked in social settings during initial interactions with tangible objects.This research introduces the concept of Curiosity Portals as a framework for designing and understanding these initial moments of curiosity.Through interviews with staff, artists, and attendees at the Metro Independent Comics Expo (MICE), the study identifies configurations of invitational entryways or "portals" that catalyze curiosity.These portals, categorized as sensorial, novel, accessible, social, and aesthetic, are shaped by the distinct curiosities of each participant group.The study reveals how these portals foster curiosity by providing opportunities for hands-on engagement, surprise, social interaction, and exploration.The proposed framework provides a toolkit to understand and leverage these entry points of curiosity to enhance the design of tactile objects and playthings to foster continuous exploration and deeper learning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Acting, Sensing, and Writing: Making Sense of Self-Authored Data

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Data literacy is increasingly becoming an essential ability in our age of information.Core skills to be data literate include reading, writing, and interpreting data.When reading and writing data, the interpretation of data requires considerations of authorship as part of the sensemaking process.In this paper, we interpret data interactions with respect to authorship, which we operationalize as acting, sensing, and writing data.We highlight what that means for reading self-authored data.With data from a summer program, we examine youth's sensemaking across a four part activity, wherein they use a jump rope sensor, recreate it with a new sensor, and then create their own version of a jump counter.This analysis presents emerging relationships between different configurations of author and reader and how those structures afford different sensemaking opportunities with data.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Design Principles for Authentically Embedding Computer Science in Sports

  ACM Transactions on Computing Education · 2025-03-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Objectives . Athletics and sports represent a focal part of adolescence for millions of youth around the world. However, opportunities to engage in computer science (CS) learning experiences are less prevalent, particularly among Hispanic and low-income communities. Recently, researchers have explored ways to bridge these, seemingly, disparate disciplines. Much of this prior research centers on the proliferation of sports technologies that support individualistic learning experiences. Additionally, many of these experiences are developed by researchers with limited design contributions from sports practitioners. To extend prior work, this project centers youth athletic identities and the associated cultural contexts of sports to explore ways that computing technologies can enhance and develop youth athletic identities and sports performance. Moreover, this work surfaces ways that athletics can be a generative and fulfilling space to learn about CS. Participants . In summer 2021, we collaborated with basketball coaches to design and implement a computing-enhanced learning experience with a basketball team of Hispanic participants in Puerto Rico. Eleven basketball athletes from a high school in southern Puerto Rico participated in the study. The participants have strong sports identities, as demonstrated by their lifelong engagement with team sports. Conversely, only one 1 of the 11 participants had experienced sports technologies, and none of them had previously participated in computing learning experiences. Study Method . In collaboration with local basketball coaches, we co-designed a learning experience that centers sports identities and practices and adds computing as a way to extend existing sports identities and local sports activities. We present and evaluate this learning experience using a design-based research approach. Participants’ feedback was collected in the form of surveys, designs, and journal entries, and additional data on their experiences were collected via videos and researchers’ field notes. Using a mixed-methods approach, we highlight existing participants’ identities and perceptions as well as their experiences with our design. We complement quantitative analysis of survey responses with case studies. Findings . We find that our design can provide shifts in youth student-athletes’ perceptions of computing. Additionally, hands-on experiences with computing tools enable participants to start practicing CS sensemaking via learning how different computing tools can support their sports performance individually and as a team. Furthermore, we find that the material, ideational, and relational resources made available through camp:bit supported each participant differently, while collectively providing a space for all of them to have meaningful and fulfilling experiences. Finally, we find that this design can foster and support sports team cohesion. Conclusions . We provide in-depth descriptions of our design, the youth’s engagement with it, and how these learning experiences can be further applied in sports spaces. These examples highlight a unique conception of practice-linked computational identities—where learners’ computational identities are grounded in a specific culturally relevant practice, enabling a more culturally sustaining computing learning experience. Finally, our analysis suggests five design principles for designing and conducting computing-supported learning experiences in sports environments. The principles are as follows: (1) Sports Experience: Authentically Support Existing Identities. (2) Team Dynamics: Team Athletes Are Part of a Whole. (3) Individual Pursuits: Supporting Individual Paths. (4) Direct Interactions: Conversations with Materials and Ideas. (5) Interdisciplinary Facilitation Team: Complementary Skills. These design principles can be used by researchers, practitioners, and local stakeholders to implement sport-centric CS learning experiences to extend and enhance the way student-athletes from marginalized communities practice sports, as well as to activate interest and engagement in CS.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Athletic Tinkering: Playful Computing Learning at the Intersection of Sports and Technology

  Proceedings. · 2025-06-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this work, we implement computing tools in athletic spaces where youth leverage their pre-existing interests and expertises in sports to make sense of technology.Through this, we aim to create culturally sustaining computing experiences.We analyze young learners and facilitators making sense of a volleyball themed iPad-based training game through play and embodied interactions.We find participants leveraging a variety of athletic resources to tinker with and make sense of how this technology works.We call this embodied and athletic engagement with technology athletic tinkering.This presents an example of culturally sustaining conceptualizations of STEM and computing learning, and it offers heuristics on how to design for similar activity-linked embodied interaction experiences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Designing for Learning at the Intersection of Sports, Analytics and Physical Computing

  NSF · $572k · 2021–2026

• Designing and Evaluating a Naturalistic Platform for Collaborative Learning About Spatial Reasonings

  NSF · $782k · 2018–2022

• Computational Thinking and Physical Computing in Physical Education

  NSF · $1.0M · 2020–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Vishesh Kumar

  35 shared

• Paulo Blikstein

  Columbia University

  30 shared

• Nichole Pinkard

  26 shared

• Maggie Dahn

  University of California, Irvine

  25 shared

• Melissa Braaten

  25 shared

• Thomas M. Philip

  University of California, Berkeley

  25 shared

• Ricarose Roque

  University of Colorado Boulder

  25 shared

• Michael Alan Chang

  University of California, Berkeley

  25 shared