I started high school in 1995. Kurt Cobain was dead, my after school play was a mix of Super Nintendo and origami, OJ was found not guilty, and President Clinton had just begun his balanced budget initiative, and my state of Oregon had just approved fully convert voting to mail-in…

TLDR: I’m proud to announce public beta of Wordplay, a new educational programming language for making plaful interactive typography (and many other things!) with code and data. We made it for the world, but particularly for adolescents, especially those who like emojis, words, and fonts, and want to bring them…

As I’ve aged, I’ve come to believe that within each of us is an artist. When we consider this claim from a developmental standpoint, it’s kind of obvious: all children by a certain age want to express themselves, and it’s just a question of what media they gravitate towards. Some…

My childhood was not a quiet one. Part of it was movement and conflict. For a brief time, my parents saw building and selling homes as a way to climb out of the lower-middle class, and so my childhood was full of hammering and saws and landscaping and grout, and…

I’ve spent the year traveling, all over the world and country, having wonderful conversations with colleagues about learning, design, computing. It’s been exhausting, riveting, restorative, and revealing. …

Since being promoted to Professor in 2020, and especially since coming out as trans, a significant part of my job has been mentoring faculty. Some junior, some senior, some in my own school, some in departments at my university, and many more outside my university. In any given month, I’m…

Since the age of 15, I was fascinated by consciousness. I read everything I could about it, from popular books summarizing science to non-fiction memoirs like Aldous Huxley’s the doors of perception. What struck me about the topic was how unexplainable it was: how could we feel existence so richly…

There’s a lot going on in the world right now, and most of it is bad news, with climate change, loss of civil rights, increases in anti-trans violence, continued police killings. …

After a celebratory weekend of my daughter’s college graduation in San Diego, I went to Atlanta to listen, learn, and talk about equity in computing education. I went with trepidation — not of the meeting, but of Georgia. I don’t have any rational reason to be afraid. My violation of…