Howdy! Welcome to Junnan Yu's Homepage!
Junnan Yu is a Ph.D. student in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado, United States. He is a member of the Creative Communities research group. Advised by Professor Ricarose Roque, his research is focused on understanding, supporting, and designing the ecology (e.g., children, parents, and technologies) around children's informal learning. Currently, he is exploring how to bring Computer Science education to the playground for young children through physical play, children's learning with computational toys and kits, as well as parent-child interaction with technologies.
Updates
June 2020 - Junnan will join the Summer Institute of Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University in July and work on projects on AI Policy and Inclusion. The Berkman Klein Center is a renowned world-class research center for Internet & Society.
Mar 2020 - Junnan was awarded the CU Boulder Outreach Micro Grants ($1,870) for his work on the exploration of leveraging physical play to support computational learning for children in community-based organizations.
Feb 2020 - Junnan passed the first milestone in his Ph.D. study: the preliminary examination! How exciting!
His prelim committee members:
Ricarose Roque (chair), Department of Information Science
Laura Devendorf, ATLAS Institute & Department of Information Science
R. Benjamin Shapiro, Department of Computer Science
Feb 2020 - A team of researchers from CU Boulder (Junnan Yu, Andrea Devore, Mariana Aki Tamashiro, Joy Weiberg, and Julisa Granados) organized two 4-hour coding workshops in the Museum of Boulder for children between 8-11 years old. Participants created and played with physical activities using computational toolkits (i.e., micro:bit) in the workshops. [More details]
Jan 2020 - Junnan Yu, Chenke Bai (INFO undergrad), and Ricarose Roque had a paper titled "Considering Parents in Coding Kit Design: Understanding Parents' Perspectives and Roles" accepted to the CHI 2020. I will present the paper in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA in April.