- Lifelong Kindergarten
Karishma Chadha is a PhD student in the Lifelong Kindergarten group and a recipient of the MIT Presidential Fellowship Award. She is passionate about designing welcoming, joyful, and playful creative learning tools and experiences that foster young people’s creative expression and sense of belonging in computing.
Karishma’s work focuses on themes of personal identity, cultural expression, storytelling, designing for belonging, cultivating care, and supporting critical reflection and engagement with technology.
In her recent research Karishma has been exploring designing new experiences with Generative AI that nurture young people as creators. Her Imagine Yourself project incorporates a design-based research methodology to explore a new image generation experience within Scratch to foster personal representation and storytelling.
Previously Karishma worked as the co-lead of the Scratch engineering team, and has a background and interest spanning a diverse array of topics including: learning design, creative computing, computer science education, programming languages, formal methods, and cyber security.
Karishma received her B.A. in Computer Science from Wellesley College.