Howdy!
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 centered around understanding, supporting, and designing the ecology (e.g., children, parents, and technologies) around children's learning and interaction with technology. Currently, he is exploring how to leverage physical play to provide physically active and engaging coding experiences for children, and working on projects that aim to understand children's learning with computational toys and kits, as well as parent-child interaction around educational technologies.
Updates
December 2020 - Junnan Yu, Andrea DeVore (ATLAS undergrad), and Ricarose Roque had a paper titled "Parental Mediation for Young Children’s Use of Educational Media: A Case Study with Computational Toys and Kits" accepted to the ACM CHI 2021 conference. This paper proposes a parental mediation framework for children's engagement with creation-oriented educational media. Junnan will present the paper virtually in May 2021.
October 2020 - Junnan Yu, Janet Ruppert (INFO Ph.D.), Ricarose Roque, Ben Kirshner (Professor in Education, CU) had a paper titled "Youth Civic Engagement Through Computing: Cases and Implications" accepted to ACM Inroads!
October 2020 - Junnan was awarded the Gerald C. Bean Scholarship by the College of Media, Communication and Information, University of Colorado Boulder. This scholarship is a recognition of his research accomplishment.
June 2020 - Junnan will join the Summer Institute of Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University in July and work on projects on Youth and Media. The Berkman Klein Center is a renowned world-class research center for Internet & Society.
March 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.
February 2020 - Junnan passed the first milestone in his Ph.D. study: the preliminary examination!
- His prelim committee members:
- Dr. Ricarose Roque (chair), Department of Information Science
- Dr. Laura Devendorf, ATLAS Institute & Department of Information Science
- Dr. R. Benjamin Shapiro, Department of Computer Science
February 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]
January 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 ACM CHI 2020 conference. Junnan will present the paper in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA in April.