Yasmin B. Kafai, the Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, received the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Professor Kafai shares the award with her colleague Mitchel J. Resnick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were both honored for their long-lasting contributions to creative computing and for developing new ways for young people to create and collaborate within learning communities.
Professor Kafai and Professor Resnick are known for their roles in developing Scratch, a global programming platform that has become the world’s largest coding community for young people. The platform enables children and youth around the globe to learn coding by designing, sharing, and remixing interactive stories, games, and animations. In addition to her work with Scratch, Professor Kafai has been a pioneer in bringing electronic textiles (e-textiles) into high school classrooms. By integrating circuitry and computing into fabric-based projects, e-textiles offer new, hands-on ways to teach coding and engineering concepts.
A Penn faculty member since 2008, Professor Kafai is the editor and co-author of numerous books, including Connected Play: Tweens in a Virtual World (MIT Press, 2013), Connected Code: Why Children Need to Learn Programming (MIT Press, 2014), and Connected Gaming: What Making Video Games Can Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (MIT Press, 2016). Her current research investigates how youth develop AI literacy by designing their own generative language models and engaging in auditing AI systems to identify bias and harmful outcomes.
A graduate of the Technische Universität Berlin in Germany, Professor Kafai holds a doctorate from Harvard University.