< Portfolio

Nairobi Play

My paper for this project, "Computing Education for Intercultural Learning," has received a Best Paper Honorable Mention award at CSCW 2019. A pre-print is available here.

From January-March and June-July 2018, I traveled to Kenya to research and support the Nairobi Play Project, an intercultural, intro programming course for refugee youth in Nairobi and Kakuma refugee camp.

Nairobi Play was founded by Ariam Mogos, then the Digital Learning lead at UNICEF Innovation. Research is advised by Kentaro Toyama at the University of Michigan and Steve Jackson at Cornell.

The intervention is designed to address ethnic tension, which is prevalent across East Africa as a holdover from colonialism. To resolve tension, historically the UN has sponsored "peace education" programs for adolescents such as sports. Nairobi Play integrates intercultural competence (IC) activities into intro computer programming with Scratch. Classes bring together students from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Great Lakes cultures, Somalia, and Sudan, in order to encourage and facilitate positive intercultural interaction.

For this project I:

• Developed and adapted evaluative measures, including tests and surveys
• Conducted fieldwork in Nairobi and Kakuma refugee camp, including writing over 300 pages of notes and holding 32 interviews across two program cycles
• Applied grounded theory methods; synthesized and analyzed quant. and qual. data. Wrote Python scripts to streamline process: converter from typed short- hand into longhand; data cruncher that takes in Excel files and runs statistics (e.g. t-test); stratified random sampler given Excel recruitment sheets
• Contributed to CS curriculum and implementation
• Helped design study (RCT with stratified random sampling)

Nairobi Play is funded by UNICEF Kenya. Summer research was generously supported by a travel grant from the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace & Conflict studies.