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Karen Brennan

Karen Brennan is an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research is primarily concerned with the ways in which learning environments in and out of school, online and face-to-face  can be designed to support young people's development as computational creators. Many of Brennan's research and teaching activities focus on constructionist approaches to designing learning environments  encouraging learning through designing, personalizing, connecting, and reflecting, and maximizing learner agency.

Some current projects include: Cultures of Computing, an examination of how K-12 teachers design learning environments to support novice programmers, focusing on teachers' design intentions and how those intentions are enacted; ScratchEd, a model of professional learning for educators who support computational literacy with the Scratch programming language, involving the development of a 15,000-member online community, in-person events, and curricular materials; and Cultivating Computational Thinking, an investigation of the concepts, practices, and perspectives that young people develop through computational design activities.

Brennan currently teaches two courses, T-553: Learning, Teaching, and Technology—a course considering current trends through the lens of critical theory and the practices of design thinking, and T-550: Designing for Learning by Creating—a course on constructionism: learning through making, personalizing, sharing, and reflecting.

Before joining HGSE, Brennan completed her Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, as well as an MA in curriculum studies, B.Ed. in computer science and mathematics, and B.Sc. in computer science and mathematics at the University of British Columbia.