Mark Guzdial

Director of

Lead PI on Project "Georgia Computes!", an NSF Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance.


New or Darn Useful!


Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He was the Director of Undergraduate Programs (including the BS in Computer Science, BS in Computational Media, and Minor in Computer Science) until October 2007. Mark is a member of the GVU Center, the Cognitive Science program, and the EduTech Institute. He received his Ph.D. in education and computer science (a joint degree) at the University of Michigan in 1993, where he developed Emile, an environment for high school science learners programming multimedia demonstrations and physics simulations. He was the original developer of the CoWeb (or Swiki), which is now one of the most widely used Wiki engines in Universities around the world. He is the inventor of the Media Computation approach to learning introductory computing, which uses contextualized computing education to attract and retain students. He is currently vice-chair of the ACM Education Board.

Areas of Interest

Computer science education, educational computing, software-realized scaffolding, collaborative multimedia, construction and design environments for students, constructionism, collaboration support, log file analysis and visualization, computational science (computer modeling, simulation, and visualization) for students

Mark Guzdial's current research centers on facilitating student learning through student design, construction, and analysis of artifacts. Philosophically, he is a constructivist, even a constructionist, but he sees a need for support to enable and facilitate a student's construction of artifacts and knowledge.

One way of looking at what Mark is working on is collaborative Dynabooks. He wants to achieve the Dynabook vision (of Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, of the Xerox PARC Learning Research Group in the 70's, and now the Disney Imagineering Media Research Group) of a learning machine for developing computational media (where programming itself is a kind of medium). He adds to that vision a desire for a collaborative environment where media can be easily created, shared, and distributed by groups.

Current Research Projects

If you're a student and interested on working on a project with me, please check out my mini-projects list. (Updated Frequently!) In general, you'll find my AniAniWeb (think "personal Swiki") is more updated than this page.


Contact information:

Mark Guzdial
College of Computing/GVU
801 Atlantic Drive
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA, 30332-0280
404-894-5618
E-mail :
guzdial@cc.gatech.edu