Wednesday
18
November 2026
4:00 - 5:00 PM IST
Location
Room 004, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Building Joyful Interactives
Arts and Sciences Lecture Series
Neeldhara Misra
Associate Professor
Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar
Speaker
Reading about an idea and wrestling with it are different cognitive acts. A well- designed interactive experience, tactile or virtual, can merge these aspects: when a learner plays with concrete examples and experiments with parameters, the ideas become conjectures to test, refine, and potentially generalise. A productive interactive experience is not only about ornamental animation or frictionless learning; it is about agency, immediate feedback, and the productive surprise of being wrong in an informative way. Over several years of building small, purpose-built web interactives, I have found that key decisions are structural: what the learner can change, what remains fixed, and how quickly the system reflects their move. The process of making interactives is iterative, and AI-assisted coding has changed the economics: a pedagogical hunch can become an afternoon prototype, making experimentation cheap enough to take seriously. The human in the loop remains responsible for mathematical correctness, purpose, taste, and care. This talk will be a case study of interactive experiences (also known as explorable explanations) I have enjoyed working with, along with commentary on what makes them fun and useful.
Speaker
Neeldhara Misra
Neeldhara Misra is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar. She completed her PhD from the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, in 2012 in Theoretical Computer Science. Her research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms and computational social choice. She is also interested in visualisations and other methods to communicate computational thinking at an elementary level. She also enjoys learning about new card tricks, especially self-working ones — even though she can’t remember any!