Harshini Venkatachalam

Harshini Venkatachalam has a BA in computer science and visual art from Brown University.  For six semesters, she was a teaching assistant in the computer science department at Brown and received a Senior Prize for contributions to the department.  Harshini is broadly interested in using computing and technology for social good.

Harshini’s Fulbright-Nehru project is developing technology to help learners develop computational thinking skills.  Computational thinking encompasses a range of skills in problem solving and system design, with one key skill being abstraction – the ability to overcome complexity by generalizing solutions.  Harshini’s project is motivated by the need to understand how novice programmers learn abstraction within the existing pedagogy and thus develop novel methods to help them learn abstraction.  During her study, in the course of development of tools, data is also being collected about participant engagement.  The deliverables of the project include a novel tool (a mobile application), a literature review, and a detailed report.