A Little About Me

I am an Associate Professor of Computing and Innovation at the Olin College of Engineering in Needham, MA.

You can read a short bio about what I am up to now in my faculty profile. You can learn about my journey by watching my 2019 Eyeo Festival talk or my 2015 TEDx talk to get an idea of the kinds of life experiences that brought me to direct the the EASE Lab, which investigates Extending Access to STEM Empowerment. Projects explore the ways in which spaces, computational tools, and activities can enable young people to re-engineer the world around them and transform how they think and learn.

Kids and colleagues alike call me "Dr. Splat" because of my position as "The Unruly Professor" at Unruly Studios, the EASE Lab incubated company that Babson College MBA alumna Bryanne Leeming founded to introduce Unruly Splats. I host the unofficial Splat Museum to show students and visitors what went into the first prototypes of wireless programmable floor tiles we made together as we built a team of amazing team that you can read about here.

I hold an appointment as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, where I received my Ph.D. from the Lifelong Kindergarten Research Group. I am a co-inventor of the Scratch programming language (and apparently still exist as a sprite through Scratch 3.0). I also work closely with the Center for Bits and Atoms, still contributing to the programming at the first Fab Lab (which I helped set up in Boston's South End Technology Center - the template for the worldwide Network of Fab Labs) such as the Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn teen empowerment program. Alumni from that program are now leaders at Modkit, a company I co-founded with Ed Baafi and Collin Reisdorf that ultimately produced the progrmamming environment found in Vex IQ Robotics Systems.