Faculty Expert

  • Yasmin B. Kafai

    Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor

    Learning, Teaching, and Literacies Division

Yasmin B. Kafai, the Lori and Michael Milken President’s Distinguished Professor of Learning Sciences, has been recognized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) with the prestigious Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. The award honors Kafai’s decades-long contributions to creative computing and her leadership in reimagining how young people learn, create, and collaborate through technology.

Kafai shares the 2025 award with Mitchel J. Resnick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Together, their work has reshaped K-12 computer science education by advancing innovative tools and approaches that emphasize creativity, community, and inclusion.

At the heart of Kafai’s impact is her role in developing Scratch, the widely used programming platform that has become the world’s largest coding community for young people. With more than 150 million registered users and over 1 billion projects created, Scratch has enabled children and youth around the globe to learn coding by designing, sharing, and remixing interactive stories, games, and animations.

In addition to her work with Scratch, Kafai has been a pioneer in bringing electronic textiles, also known as e-textiles, into high school classrooms. Electronic textile innovations integrate circuitry and computing into fabric-based projects, offering new, hands-on ways to teach coding and engineering concepts. By blending computing with crafts and design, e-textiles have helped broaden participation in computer science, especially among learners who may not see themselves represented in traditional computing pathways.

The ACM’s Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award recognizes educators who advance teaching methodologies, drive curriculum innovation, and make significant contributions to the educational mission of computing. ACM cited Kafai and Resnick for their “long-lasting and collective contributions to creative computing,” underscoring the lasting influence of their work on both educational practice and the broader computing community.

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