Over the last couple of months, I have given talks on how my team and I design for joy in our learning opportunities for youth and families. In April, I gave a talk for the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies at AERA 2024. Then in May, I adapted this talk for a keynote for the Colorado Library Association Maker Workshop. I share here an edited version of both talks, which is organized in three parts: What do I mean when I talk about joy? How do we design for joy? And how can joy be a sustaining force?

Our team is excited to share a new resource for educators in the form of a zine called “What Does Equity Mean to Me"?” This zine is based on research our team conducted with informal learning educators, or facilitators, from 2020-2022. In addition to the zine, we made a facilitator guide for educators to use the zine with their peers to reflect on what equity means in their spaces and organizations together. The facilitator guide includes a sample workshop outline, facilitation tips, and other strategies that we’ve gathered from our experiences facilitating these sessions with educators.

This summer, our Creative Communities research group will be presenting our work at ISLS, FAccT, IDC, C&C, and PML. We look forward to sharing our work more broadly, especially as many conference and gatherings are in-person again. We’ll feature our work studying family learning, infrastructures of informal learning settings, embodied algorithmic tinkering, physical play and computing, and facilitating computational tinkering.

Our Creative Communities research group is seeking research coordinator to support in our community-based research and design projects in the areas of informal learning, creative learning experiences with computing, and equity-oriented community design.

The Creative Communities research group in the department of Information Science at CU Boulder is seeking PhD students to join our team. Our research group consists of students with a variety of backgrounds and interests. These backgrounds include working with youth in different settings, community organizing, designing and developing technical systems, and creative media production. Students become active contributors and take on leadership roles in the design and development of learning technologies and experiences, research on how people learn, resources for educators, and relationships with community partners. Learn more about our team and our values here.

As part of our Family Creative Learning Facilitator Guide, ScratchJr edition, we included a set of visual facilitator stories that we call “Facilitating Facilitators” to showcase the practices, reflections, and growth of facilitators. We hope these stories can highlight the essential role played by facilitators in supporting equitable and creative learning experiences for youth and families, especially from groups who have been marginalized from opportunities. In addition, we hope these stories can be a tool for other facilitators and facilitation teams to reflect on their own experiences and practices.

We’re excited to share a new version of the Family Creative Learning Facilitator Guide, the ScratchJr Edition! This guide is for educators, community center staff, and volunteers interested in engaging children and their families in creative and equitable experiences with computing. In this guide, you will find imagining and planning activities, tools to prepare your facilitation team, and workshop outlines. Infused throughout the pages of the guide are our design rationale for the overall program framework as well as our visual documentation to illustrate how we implemented the program.

The Creative Communities research group in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) seeks a postdoctoral researcher in areas of informal learning, creative learning experiences with computing, and equity-oriented community design.

The Creative Communities research group in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) seeks a postdoctoral researcher in areas of informal learning, creative learning experiences with computing, and equity-oriented community design.

The Creative Communities research group is looking for PhD students who are interested in working youth and families from underrepresented groups in STEM, developing experience in community-based research, examining equity and inclusion in learning environments, and exploring the possibilities of learning with creative technologies.

We're excited to launch our new website for our Creative Communities research group. Our group is exploring how we can engage people to create, play, and learn together. We want to support people to create things they care about, to see themselves as creators, and to see the ways they can shape the world around them.