Jennifer Tsan is a doctoral candidate under the advisement of Dr. Collin Lynch and Dr. Kristy Boyer. Her research interests include computer science education, advanced learning technologies, and spoken dialogue systems. Her overarching research goal is to understand how elementary students collaborate while they program and support them in order to improve their learning experience.
Jennifer defended her Doctoral Dissertation entitled "Developing Adaptive Support for Collaborative Problem Solving Between Upper-Elementary Computer Science Learners." in the Fall of 2020. She is now a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago.
Jennifer's work was focused on the Friendly Learning Environment for Kids' Computer Science (FLECKS) project. The goal of the project is to build an intelligent, adaptive system to support elementary students as they collaborate to solve computer science problems. For this project Jennifer is developing curricula, teaching classes, and collecting data of elementary students as they pair program. Additionally, she is conducting research on existing block-based programming environments to determine which technology is optimal for the audience. Finally, Jennifer is conducting qualitative analyses of the pair programming data. She uses videos, audio, and screen recordings to understand the students' pair programming process and identify areas that prove to be challenging to children working in this domain. She will use her findings to inform future development of adaptive support for elementary students solving computer science problems.
Before attending NC State, Jennifer attended West Chester University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a Computer Science degree.