Jin Yu
Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University
Thursday, November 19, 2026
4:30 – 5:20 p.m.
In person: 134 Sieg Building
Thinking Through Making: Tangible Tools for Youth Building Interactive Devices
Youth bring perspectives shaped by their everyday lives, identities, and cultural contexts. Yet youth co-design of interactive technologies often stops at early ideas. Without accessible tools to go further, young participants rarely build or test what they imagine. Their needs and values stay abstract and are seldom expressed through concrete design decisions. In this talk, I will share how I design tangible tools that help youth carry their own ideas forward, moving back and forth between imagining, building, and evaluating interactive devices. I will present three lines of work with middle-school youth and educators. My:Talkies is a craft kit that introduces communication-technology concepts through expressive, story-driven making. Tangible-MakeCode and iReal give youth hands-on materials for building functional prototypes: physical coding blocks that connect to MakeCode and micro:bit, and foldable templates for shaping a device’s form. CoVal positions youth as evaluators of their own and their peers’ prototypes, surfacing their situated values through critique. Across these studies, I suggest that what helps youth’s ideas evolve is also what supports their thinking and learning through making. I will close with ongoing work on how AI might support, rather than replace, this process.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Jin Yu is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, where she works with Dr. Alissa Antle. Her research focuses on designing interactive tools that support children’s thinking through making, with a focus on physical and tangible computing. Her work spans tangible programming, functional prototyping for youth co-design, and how AI can support children’s making. She publishes in venues such as ACM CHI, IDC, TEI, and CoDesign. Her work on Tangible-MakeCode has also led to a patent application. Jin received her PhD in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech, advised by Dr. HyunJoo Oh.
About the HCDE Research Speaker Series
The HCDE Research Speaker Series features research from faculty and PhD students in Human Centered Design & Engineering and affiliated academic communities. Talks are held Thursdays during autumn quarter and are open to the public.
View the series lineup