Peer-reviewed publications

• Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists

  Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill

  Honorable mention ACM CHI 2017 [ACM DL][Blog Post]

• Youth Perspectives on Critical Data Literacies

  Samantha Hautea, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill

  ACM CHI 2017 [ACM DL][Blog Post]

• Learning to Code in Localized Programming Languages

  Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill

  ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S) 2017 [ACM DL][Blog Post]

• Children’s Civic Engagement in the Scratch Online Community

  Ricarose Roque, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Sasha Costanza-Chock

  Social Sciences. 2016; 5(4):55 [MDPI]

• Skill Progression in Scratch Revisited

  J. Nathan Matias, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill

  ACM CHI 2016 [ACM DL]

• Remixing as a Pathway to Computational Thinking

  Sayamindu Dasgupta, William Hale, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Benjamin Mako Hill

  Honorable mention ACM CSCW 2016 [ACM DL][Blog Post]

• Extending Scratch: New Pathways into Programming

  Sayamindu Dasgupta, Shane M. Clements, Abdulrahman Y. idlbi, Chris Willis-Ford, and Mitchel Resnick

  Best short paper IEEE VL/HCC 2015 [pre-print PDF][IEEE DL]

• Engaging Novices in Programming, Experimenting, and Learning with Data

  Sayamindu Dasgupta and Mitchel Resnick

  ACM Inroads (2014) [ACM DL]

• Surveys, Collaborative Art, and Virtual Currencies: Children Programming with Online Data

  Sayamindu Dasgupta

  International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2014) [ScienceDirect]

  Extended version of IDC paper listed below.

• From Surveys to Collaborative Art: Enabling Children to Program with Online Data

  Sayamindu Dasgupta

  IDC 2013 [ACM DL]

  Extended version invited and published in IJCCI as part of “IDC 2013 best papers” section.

• Rope Revolution: Tangible and Gestural Rope Interface for Collaborative Play

  Lining Yao, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Nadia Cheng, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Ostap Rudakevych, and Hiroshi Ishii

  ACE 2011 [ACM DL]

Extended abstracts, posters, and workshop papers

• Measuring Learning of Code Patterns in Informal Learning Environments

  Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill

  Poster for the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (2017) [ACM DL (abstract)] [Poster]

• Learning With Data: Designing for Community Introspection and Exploration

  Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill

  Position paper for Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science (a CSCW 2016 workshop). [PDF]

• Block-based Programming with Scratch Community Data: A Position Paper

  Sayamindu Dasgupta

  Position paper for Blocks and Beyond: Lessons and Directions for First Programming Environments (a VL/HCC 2015 workshop). [IEEE DL]

• RopePlus: Bridging Distances with Social and Kinesthetic Rope Games

  Lining Yao, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Nadia Cheng, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Ostap Rudakevych, and Hiroshi Ishii

  ACM CHI 2011 Extended Abstracts (alt-chi) [ACM DL]

• Multi-jump: Jump Roping over Distances

  Lining Yao, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Nadia Cheng, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Ostap Rudakevych, and Hiroshi Ishii

  ACM CHI 2011 Extended Abstracts (CHI work-in-progress poster) [ACM DL]

• Interactive Ebooks: Experiments on the OLPC XO-1 Book-reading System

  Sayamindu Dasgupta

  International Conference on Designing for Children - With focus on ‘Play + Learn’ (2010) [PDF]

Theses

• Children as Data Scientists: Explorations in Creating, Thinking, and Learning with Data

  PhD Thesis, MIT (2016)

• Learning with Data: A Toolkit to Democratize the Computational Exploration of Data

  Masters Thesis, MIT (2012)

Data science education for youth

I design, build, and study the use of computer programming toolkits that enable children to programmatically analyze data from various sources—empowering them to be data scientists in their own ways, and enabling them to learn through making. One of the systems that I have designed, implemented, and studied is Scratch Community Blocks. With this system, children in the Scratch community not only created programs that analyzed and visualized data about their and their peers’ learning and participation; but also, they engaged in critically thinking about the implications of data access and analysis. In contrast to the dominant trend in educational technology where data is collected from learners and rarely given back, this project’s goal was to empower young learners with access to their own data, as well as with “meta-tools” to analyze it.

Data science in the service of education

Drawing from theories in education and the broader social sciences, I use data collected from online informal learning communities to empirically identify factors that support and foster learning. In one of my collaborative studies, we looked at the relationship between remixing in Scratch and learning outcomes of more than 170,000 community members who participate in remixing. To our knowledge, this is the first large-scale empirical study that provides support for theories which suggest that young people learn through remixing.

Unpacking Impact: Reflecting As We Make

In this course, we took a reflective and critical look into the wider implications of technologies in society, developing intentional awareness on those implications in our design, making, and research. I co-designed and co-taught this course along with two other PhD students at the Media Lab, Ricarose Roque, and J. Nathan Matias.

MIT, Fall 2015
[Course website][Reflection blog post]

Learning Creative Learning

Learning Creative Learning was an introduction to ideas and strategies underlying the design of new technologies to support creative learning experiences, with special focus on technologies from our Lifelong Kindergarten research group. This course was taught by Mitchel Resnick, Natalie Rusk, and Philipp Schmidt. I was a teaching assistant in this course.

MIT, Spring 2013
[Course website]