Research Projects

Physical Play, Learning & Tech

In this project, we focus on how physical play can be leveraged as a medium to support learning. We are exploring research questions like how learning goals can be integrated into physical play and how can we design technologies to leverage physical play to support learning?

CodeAttach

How can we expand the ways how children can engage in computational learning and make the experience more active and social? In this project, we develop CodeAttach, a learning kit designed to engage young children in computational thinking through physical play activities.

Parents & Coding Kits

This study aims to learn parents’ perspectives on their young children’s use of computational toys and kits. The findings provide insights for designers and researchers to better understand parents’ expectations and consider parents in computational kit design.

Computational Kits Survey

We present a survey of computational toys and kits that enable young children to explore computational ideas and practices. The survey reveals the commonalities across existing kits and highlights ways to expanding the possibilities for children to create, explore, and play with computing.

Civic Engagement & computing

To better understand the role of computer programming in civic engagement, this study examines programs that engaged young people in civic examination, discussion, and creaton using computing. Based on the analysis, we discussed how to support youth civic engagement through computing.

Localization of Text CAPTCHA

Taking the usability investigation of Chinese CAPTCHAs as a case study, we compared the usability of CAPTCHAs based on English and Chinese languages, explored the intrinsic factors that may affect the usability of Chinese CAPTCHAs, and proposed a generalized procedure for designing usable localized text CAPTCHAs.