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Hal Abelson

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Community of Research

Computing & Society Community of Research

This community is interested in understanding and affecting the interaction between computing systems and society through engineering, computer science and public policy research, education, and public engagement.

News

MIT App Inventor receives award from the Mass Technology Leadership Council

This week it was announced that Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) will present CSAIL principal investigator Hal Abelson’s team with the Distinguished Leadership Award for their work on the MIT App Inventor.App Inventor is a cloud-based open-source tool that lets users of all skill levels create working apps via smartphones and tablets. It serves as educational platform for teaching computing in middle school and high school, aimed at creating excitement around computer science at younger ages.

Teaching Hong Kong students to embrace computational thinking

CoolThink@JC, a four-year initiative of The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, was launched today to empower the city’s primary school teachers and students with computational thinking skills, including coding.Developed through a collaboration with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Education University of Hong Kong, and City University of Hong Kong, the eventual aim is to integrate computational thinking into all Hong Kong primary schools. Initially, CoolThink@JC will target over 16,500 students at 32 primary schools across the city.

Education Goes Mobile

Hal Abelson - the Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, a principal investigator at CSAIL and co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology - has been at the forefront of not only computer science education, but also teaching in general for much of his storied career. In the past year, he has been honored with both the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Karl V. Karlstom Outstanding Educator Award and the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education for his work in advancing computer science education.