I am a professor of computer science at Aalto University since 2001. I am leading Learning+Technology research group (LeTech) whose main research area is computing education research. The foci of the group include development and evaluation of advanced learning environments and learning tools for programming education, especially tools for automatic assessment and feedback, program and algorithm simulation and visualization, and gamified approaches for learning programming.  In our empirical work, we apply a wide range of research methods ranging from qualitative interview studies till learning analytics and educational data mining.  Personally, I am also interested in meta studies and development and use of theoretical frameworks in computing education.

I have been leading the national Center of Excellence in Education at Helsinki University of Technology in 2001-2006.  I have chaired several international conferences in computing education research (Koli Calling 2004, 2008 and ICER 2017-2018). I have also been a regular columnist in ACM Inroads (2013-2020), and served as an editorial board member in ACM Transactions on Computing education and IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.

I received the ACM SIGCSE award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education in 2020.