Learning with data : a toolkit to democratize the computational exploration of data

Abstract

This thesis explores the space of programming with data, focusing on the data-ecosystem opened up by the Internet and Cloud technologies. The central argument of this thesis is that the act of democratizing programmatic access to online data can further unleash the generative powers of this emerging ecosystem, and enable explorations of a new set of concepts and powerful ideas. To establish the validity of this argument, this thesis introduces a learning framework for the computational exploration of online data, a system that enables children to program with online data, and then finally describes a study of children using the system to explore wide variety of creative possibilities, as well as important computational concepts and powerful ideas around data.