Transformative Learning Technologies Lab
The TLT Lab builds learning technologies and then finds out what happens when ordinary schools actually use them: robotics kits, fabrication labs, modeling environments, analytics that read gesture and speech. We have projects, fellows, and labs on five continents, and we tend to stay long enough to see whether anything changed.
Almost everything the lab makes is cheap and open by design. A tool that works only in a well-funded school is not a research finding. It is a demonstration.
Visit TLTLab.org ↗Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies
The Lemann Center advances research and partnerships dedicated to the transformation of Brazilian public education. It builds on a decade of work—including the Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Educational Innovation in Brazil, which I co-founded and directed at Stanford—to connect rigorous research with real change in classrooms.
Brazilian public education does not need more pilots. It needs research that survives contact with a real municipal school system, which is the harder and slower thing to do.
Columbia University Paulo Freire Initiative
The Paulo Freire Initiative carries forward Freire's critical pedagogy in contemporary research, teaching, and design. It is a personal as well as scholarly commitment: I attended the lab school founded by Madalena Freire in São Paulo, and that tradition of education for liberation has shaped every project since.
Tools & Platforms
Open hardware and software built in the lab and with collaborators, used in classrooms around the world.
GoGo Board
The first open-source robotics and environmental-sensing platform for education — affordable, hackable, and now in its seventh generation.
Project Bloks
A tangible coding platform that lets preschool children compose programs by arranging physical blocks, making computational thinking accessible before literacy.
Cloud Labs / BioLab
A platform for massive, remote biology experimentation that brings authentic wet-lab science to students at scale — running real experiments over the web.
MoDa
A block-based environment that interweaves computational modeling with real-world data analysis, helping middle-school students become fluent, sustained modelers.
Lab-on-a-Book
A low-cost approach that turns an ordinary printed book into a hands-on science laboratory — embedding experimentation into the page, without specialized equipment.
LightUp
A tangible electronics-prototyping kit that makes circuits visible and hands-on, helping learners see how electricity flows as they build.
Research Projects
Current and recent projects in the lab, spanning science and computer science education, cultural making, and critical studies of educational technology.
CLIC
Computational literacies integrated into the curriculum: computer science woven into mathematics, humanities, and social sciences, supporting schools implementing Brazil's BNCC Computing curriculum.
From Access to Sustainability
A software platform and research program supporting computational modeling and data collection as a sustained practice in middle-school science classrooms.
Make It Open
Developing maker-education “open schools” across Europe, building new partnerships between schools and their local communities.
Science Messaging System
Real-time, message-based STEM activities for underserved communities, requiring no resource beyond a family mobile phone.
Code.Struct
A K–12 computer science pedagogical framework and curricular pathway held true to the epistemological goals of constructionism.
Unfold Studio
A literacy-based approach to computer science: interactive storytelling that joins the power of programming to stories about learners' own lived realities.
Do Educational Technologies Have Politics?
Natural language processing and discourse analysis applied to the language of contemporary edtech, revealing its underlying patterns and motivations.
Mis/Disinformation
Documenting how disinformation spreads within Brazilian politics, and designing and evaluating tools to counter it worldwide.
Constructionism in Thailand
Twenty-five years of culturally-aware constructionism: the history and evolution of the longest constructionist implementation in the world.
People of the lab
Doctoral researchers, postdocs, designers, and collaborators across Columbia and Brazil. Add your team's profiles and photos here.