I am an assistant professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, University of Washington (UW).
I study new ways in which young people can learn with and about data—especially in contexts of the communities that they live, learn,and play in. As a part of my research, I have designed systems to enable children to design and develop their own data analysis tools, evaluated design changes in existing systems that allow more creative possibilities with data, and studied how children question and critique data and data-driven systems. I am committed to learning experiences and communities that are welcoming to all. Toward this, I have studied learner experiences with digital tools translated into the languages they speak at home, and have analyzed differences in participation patterns across genders in interest-driven and informal online learning.
As our society becomes increasingly data-driven and data-mediated, it is important to have more voices heard in imagining and shaping how and if data gets collected and used. Through my work with young people, I attempt to sow the seeds for such futures.
I received my doctorate from MIT in 2016, where I was a part of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group, and my work was centered around the Scratch programming language and online community. Before coming to UW as an assistant professor, I was an assistant professor at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before that, I was a Moore-Sloan and WRF postdoctoral fellow with the eScience Institute at the University of Washington (UW. During this time, I was hosted by the Community Data Science Collective at the UW Department of Communication, and I was also affiliated with the Human-Centered Data Science Lab.
My research has received recognition and awards at several human-computer interaction conferences (CHI, CSCW, VL/HCC, IDC). In 2014, I was selected as a member of the Forbes 30 under 30 list for Education.
Ruijia Cheng, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill
Honorable mention ACM CHI 2022 [ACM DL ]
Sejal Khatri, Aaron Shaw, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill
Laura March and Sayamindu Dasgupta
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW 2020 [UNC Institutional Repository] [ACM DL]
Emilia Gan, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Sayamindu Dasgupta
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW 2018 [ACM DL ][Blog Post]
Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill
Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill
Samantha Hautea, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill
Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill
ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S) 2017 [ACM DL][Blog Post]
Ricarose Roque, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Sasha Costanza-Chock
Social Sciences. 2016; 5(4):55 [MDPI ]
J. Nathan Matias, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill
ACM CHI 2016 [ACM DL ]
Sayamindu Dasgupta, William Hale, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Benjamin Mako Hill
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]
Sayamindu Dasgupta and Mitchel Resnick
ACM Inroads (2014) [ACM DL]
Sayamindu Dasgupta
International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (2014) [ScienceDirect]
Extended version of IDC paper listed below.
Sayamindu Dasgupta
IDC 2013 [ACM DL]
Extended version invited and published in IJCCI as part of “IDC 2013 best papers” section.
Lining Yao, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Nadia Cheng, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Ostap Rudakevych, and Hiroshi Ishii
ACE 2011 [ACM DL]
Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill
Poster for the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (2017) [ACM DL (abstract)] [Poster]
Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin Mako Hill
Position paper for Developing a Research Agenda for Human-Centered Data Science (a CSCW 2016 workshop). [PDF]
Sayamindu Dasgupta
Position paper for Blocks and Beyond: Lessons and Directions for First Programming Environments (a VL/HCC 2015 workshop). [IEEE DL]
Lining Yao, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Nadia Cheng, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Ostap Rudakevych, and Hiroshi Ishii
ACM CHI 2011 Extended Abstracts (alt-chi) [ACM DL]
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]
Sayamindu Dasgupta
International Conference on Designing for Children - With focus on ‘Play + Learn’ (2010)
Sayamindu Dasgupta, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Andrés Monroy-Hernández
In Designing Constructionist Futures: The Art, Theory, and Practice of Learning Designs. Edited by Nathan Holbert, Matthew Berland, and Yasmin Kafai. MIT Press. (2020) [MIT Press]
PhD Thesis, MIT (2016)
Masters Thesis, MIT (2012)
Programming for Information Professionals (INLS 560) provides an introduction to computer programming focusing on language fundamentals and programming techniques for library and information science applications. With a focus on Python as a programming language, course content emphasizes problem-solving through the development of practical applications.
UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2020
[Sample course syllabus]
This course introduces basic programming and data science tools to give students the skills to use data to answer questions about local and online communities. Students in the class learn to write software in Python (using Jupyter notebooks) to collect data from public datasets and web APIs and process that data to produce numbers, tables, and graphical visualizations that answer questions that they are interested in.
UNC Chapel Hill, Spring 2020
[Sample course syllabus]
This course examined theories of learning and design to identify best practices and strategies that support personally meaningful creative learning experiences for young people in a variety of settings. The material in the course covered foundational theories of creativity and learning, their design implications, as well as emergent creative learning technologies and environments (e.g., online communities, makerspaces). Additionally,a focus area of the course was on equity and inclusion—students were be encouraged to think about who gets to participate in certain types of creative learning experiences, and who gets left out.
UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2019
[Course website]
Foundations of Information Science (INLS 201) is an undergraduate level course at UNC where students examine the conceptual and technical foundations of representing, organizing, retrieving, and using information. Additionally, the interplay between the conceptual and technical foundations of information is examined critically to understand the implications of information use in our day to day and societal lives. This course is a requirement for students at UNC who wish to major in Information Science, or are minoring in Information Science.
UNC Chapel Hill, Fall 2018; Spring 2019; Fall 2019
[Sample course syllabus]
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 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]
The best way to contact me is over email. I’m not very good about monitoring my social media accounts, so Twitter DMs, Facebook messages, LinkedIn messages, etc. are most likely to go unanswered.