Bekir Mugayitoglu received his doctorate in Instructional Technology and Leadership from Duquesne University’s School of Education in 2016. His research investigated the factors that influence pre-service teachers’ attitudes about the importance of computational thinking and methods of teaching computational thinking to prepare students for computer programming. He worked for Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Academy as a content developer of immersive video games for computational thinking, robotics, and STEM-based investigations.
Dr. Mugayitoglu has also taught computer science principles and programming languages such as Python, Alice, Scratch, and ROBOTC at the undergraduate level. While working for Robomatter, Inc., an educational robotics company, he developed STEM educational solutions that emphasized computational thinking and age-appropriate programming skills, and conducted professional learning for educators online and face-to-face on how to value and integrate computational thinking practices into classrooms.
Dr. Mugayitoglu is the founder of STEM Family, an online repository of culturally relevant K-12 computer science and STEM activities for families to engage in daily computational thinking, design thinking, and systems thinking practices. He designed activities and developed lesson plans for formal and informal instruction, and supplemental guides for home use. In addition, he tested this curriculum and activities with parents and teachers at Stanford University’s d.school and San Mateo County Office of Education. Dr. Mugayitoglu did research into new emerging technologies, in order to develop new, original resources for elementary school children to learn the essentials of artificial intelligence, data science, and algorithms. He expanded upon traditional STEM training with novel computational thinking activities tied to particularly relevant new technologies.
He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Wyoming. Dr. Mugayitoglu has more than 20 publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, conference posters, conference presentations, and a book chapter.
Bekir Mugayitoglu, “Families@Play: Supporting Young Children’s Understanding of Computational Thinking Through Unplugged Family Activities,” presented at Connected Learning Summit, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA.
Bekir Mugayitoglu, “Attitudes of Pre-service Teachers Toward Computational Thinking in Computer Science Education” presented at Soda Hall, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.
Bekir Mugayitoglu, “Micro:bits + Scratch” co-facilitator at Google, San Francisco, CA.
Bekir Mugayitoglu, “Design Your STEM Weekend” presented at d.school, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Bekir Mugayitoglu, “Is there a Benefit of Self-Explanation Prompts for Learning a Programming Language?” presented at LearnLab, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
Bekir Mugayitoglu, “Help Pre-service Teachers to Recognize the Utility of Teaching Computational Thinking,” presented at MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, MA.