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When she was a kid, Angela Stewart spent a lot of time in the family car.

Her father’s career in the Marine Corps required frequent cross-country treks from one base to another. To help pass the long stretches of endless highway, he installed a DVD player in the back seat.

But this was the ’90s, before cars came equipped with such technological luxuries, so he toiled for hours to create a mobile movie theater, affixing straps to the back seat console and running power cords from the AC converter. Stewart considered the end result a feat of engineering. 

“My friends didn’t have DVD players in the back seats of their cars, but we did, because my dad took the materials that he had on hand to solve the problem,” Stewart says.

That early example of innovation in action, along with a middle school class on coding, sparked her interest in STEM. But Stewart soon found STEM wasn’t always interested in her. She was frequently the only Black girl in the classroom and teachers weren’t quite sure how to engage her.

“As a Black person, as a Black woman, there are constant assumptions of what I can and can’t do, who I am and who I’m not, and that affects how people interact with me,” she says. “Those early experiences certainly influenced me.”

They influenced her so much that she built a career upon them. Today, Stewart is an assistant professor in 51��Ʒ��Ƶ’s School of Computing and Information and a researcher at the Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), where she recently won a School of Education-LRDC Internal Award. She conducts research at the intersection of education, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, using data and technology to study learning and create more equitable and inclusive educational spaces.

Stewart’s work seeks to support the agency of classroom teachers and students, particularly the girls and people of color whose voices and perspectives continue to be marginalized in the tech world.

The most tangible example of this work is summer camp.

Each July, Stewart and her research collaborators from 51��Ʒ��Ƶ and other universities, including Carnegie Mellon, partner with the Manchester Youth Development Center on 51��Ʒ��Ƶsburgh’s North Side to study the ways that camp participants — particularly Black girls — understand and interact with technology.

Using Hummingbird Robotics Kits and craft supplies, students build personal robots with whatever materials they wish (feathers and sequins encouraged). Meanwhile, Stewart and her team observe and react to the students both in real time and by tracking their choices to better understand the multitude of ways they express their joy with technology and learning.

Sometimes, the way a student shows interest isn’t obvious. For example, during an online coding camp, several students appeared to be checked out — cameras off and microphones muted. But after looking at the data collected during the session, Stewart and her team found those students were actually in the software, experimenting with the very topic the teachers were discussing.

In traditional technology education, these non-conforming students may have been dismissed as disinterested and their abilities never nurtured. Stewart’s research ensures all students are recognized and their participation — whether overt, muted or cautious — reinforced.

While Stewart’s job is to study the ways in which learners are marginalized — and then disrupt the dominant social and educational power structures to remedy the problem — she finds that focusing on the problem alone is limiting.

“There’s another frame,” she says. “We don’t always, and have not always, created out of struggle or oppression. We also create out of joy and fun and playfulness.”

In fact, as Stewart’s dad proved in her childhood and as her research illustrates today, joy can be the mother of invention.

“There’s this view that learning has to be difficult, but I don’t think it has to be,” she says. “It can actually be fun.”