Karen Brennan

Karen Brennan is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor of Practice in Learning Technologies at Harvard Graduate School of Education and an affiliate of Harvard’s Computer Science department. She directs the Creative Computing Lab, and her work focuses on K–12 computer science education, computational thinking, and student-centered learning. She earned her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, where she was part of the team that developed the Scratch programming environment.

Brennan is the co-author, with Sarah Blum-Smith, of Start with Questions: The Classroom as Design Studio (MIT Press, 2026), a study of how teachers support students’ self-directed learning through classroom projects and inquiry.