Tugce Aldemir, Ph.D.

I am an Assistant Professor of STEM Education (Technology Education emphasis) in the Department of Teaching, Learning & Culture at Texas A&M University, and Director of the CoHALE Lab (Collaborative Human-AI Learning Ecologies in STEM+C). My research program is grounded in the learning sciences and sits at the intersection of design, collaboration, and computing. I design and study learning ecologies in which students and teachers develop disciplinary computational practices and high-quality collaboration across classrooms, teacher preparation, and professional development. Building on my longstanding work in computer-supported collaborative learning, I increasingly investigate AI agents as participants in these ecologies and how their designed roles shape reasoning, learning, and agency.

I co-design with teachers and study enactment in authentic settings through design-based research with mixed methods. Across projects, I operationalize models of collaborative and computational competence through learning designs, scaffolds, and analytic tools, using evidence of participants’ activity to examine what those models capture or miss and to refine both the designs and theoretical accounts of practice. I hold a Ph.D. in Learning and Performance Systems with an emphasis in Learning Sciences from The Pennsylvania State University and completed postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Connecticut.