Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal, MIT Media Lab
Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal are PhD students at MIT Media Lab in the Lifelong Kindergarten research group. They have been working together as creative collaborators for over a decade and have been recipients of the LEGO Papert Fellowship for their work at the intersection of creativity, learning, play, and new technologies. Earlier, the couple co-designed social and educational board games in India, which were used by 3,000 schools and reached over 300,000 families.
Recently, the pair has co-created and launched a new real-time collaborative computing platform for young people, called CoCo. Their ideas and work on CoCo have been featured by MIT News, EdSurge, and several other coding education blogs. Educators from 71 countries have already signed up to receive the beta release, expressing their excitement to use CoCo within their classrooms and communities. Through CoCo, Shruti and Manuj hope to empower young people everywhere to experience the power and joy of “Being. Creative. Together.”
Meet CoCo: A real-time co-creative computing platform for young people
On CoCo, educators can engage children and teens in an endless variety of collaborative creative computing experiences with peers—whether they’re sitting together in the same classroom or thousands of miles apart. The platform introduces a new paradigm of creative collaboration for both block-based and text-based coding (building on Scratch 3.0 and p5.js) as well as for digital art and creative writing.
Additionally, CoCo is also consciously designed as a “self-less” social platform that departs from the widely prevalent individual-centric paradigm (of profiles, likes, followers, etc.) underlying existing social platforms for young people. In this session, Shruti and Manuj will share their ideas and motivations for building CoCo and showcase the platform’s new collaborative possibilities through a live demo.
Door Prizes
- 2 Windows laptops
- Dell 24″ Monitor
- 20 Micro:bits
- 5 Climate Action Kits
- 10 The Invent to Learn Guide to Micro:bits books
- Gift Certificate for
ONE hour of teacher one-on-one
or
ONE hour co-teaching of your class - and MORE!
Lunch & Refreshments
Your lunch and refreshments during the day are provided courtesy of our sponsor, CodeToLearn.ca
For You
• Attendees will each receive a copy of the LYNX Coding Book (English or French, your choice)
Venue
OCSB Education Centre
570 W Hunt Club Rd,
Nepean, ON K2G 3R4