Nell

Eleanor "Nell" O'Rourke

June and Donald Brewer Junior Professor
Computer Science and Learning Sciences
Northwestern University
Seeley Mudd #3523

eorourke@northwestern.edu

Delta Lab

I am an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Learning Sciences. I co-direct the Delta Lab with Liz Gerber, Matt Easterday, and Haoqi Zhang. I am one of the founding faculty of Northwestern's joint PhD program in Computer Science and Learning Sciences (CS+LS).

My research sits at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, and the Learning Sciences. My interests in this area are broad, but I am particularly excited about designing, building, and studying learning environments that help students develop motivation and effective practices in computer science. Some of my recent projects include: (1) studying how students beliefs and expectations about programming shape their motivation and learning strategies, (2) building AI models to automatically detect moments when students may feel badly about their programming ability as they write code, and (3) designing learner-centered inspection tools to help novice web developers learn from authentic professional websites. I take a deeply interdisciplinary approach in my research, collecting data from a variety of sources (e.g., interviews, observations, surveys, interaction logs, sensors) and applying mixed methods (e.g., design-based research, grounded theory, lab studies, formal experiments) to better understand students and design innovative learning environments. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation (CAREER, CRII, Cyberlearning) and Google.

I received my PhD in 2016 in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington, where I was a member of the Center for Game Science and DUB.