Pratim Sengupta

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Teaching & Learning

I am a core faculty in the following PhD programs at Vanderbilt University: Learning Sciences & Learning Environments Design (LSLED), and Mathematics & Science Education (MSE). I direct the Mind, Matter & Media Lab.

My research is funded by several grants from the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER Award (2012-2017).

Along the design strand, my current research projects involve design and development of programming languages and modeling platforms for a wide age group of K12 students, with an eye towards developing complex learning progressions to foster two kinds of expertise in children: scientific modeling and computational thinking. Along the cognition strand, I am interested in building models of how experts and students reason about and learn scientific phenomena, using a combination of theoretical, empirical and computational approaches.

I am particularly interested in designing and developing new forms of generative, computational representational systems (technologies). These include visual programming languages, tangible computation, narrative-based programming, multi-agent-based models, and participatory simulations.

Most recently, I have been engaged in developing ViMAP, a new, agent-based, visual programming language and modeling platform specifically for modeling scientific phenomena. A deeper motivation is to investigate how the use of such systems can lead to rethinking how knowledge is represented in various scientific domains (e.g., complex systems, physics, evolution and ecology), and the implications for learnability of those domains.

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