ESP Biography

MANUJ DHARIWAL, PhD candidate, MIT Media Lab

Major: Media Lab

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: 2025

Brief Biographical Sketch:

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the Media Lab. My work centers around building creative learning tools & experiences for children and young people, that support the development of their thinking, their creative expression, their identities & sense of Self.

Before joining the Media Lab, I finished my master's in Computer Science at MIT and worked in the field of early childhood cognition at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. Before coming to MIT, I used to run a board game design company and designed over a dozen board games and digital games primarily in the areas of language learning and supporting neurodiverse children with Autism. These board games added playful moments in the lives of over 250,000 families and were adopted by over 3000 schools, and their digital companions were used by over half a million users. We were recognized for these efforts by the science and technology board of the Government of India in their list of Top Ten Indian Innovators.

I am also a Yoga and self-inquiry meditation practitioner, which not only have been tremendously helpful in better managing my Tourette’s but also guide me every day in living life more wholly. I am passionate about supporting young people live more whole and centered lives.

Past Classes

(Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

C16133: CoCo: Build Multiplayer Games, Collaborative Art, Animations, Interactive Video, Physical Computing Projects, and more! in Splash 2025 (Mar. 15 - 16, 2025)

In this hands-on class, you will get to explore CoCo (coco.build), a new platform developed by a team of PhD researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group. On CoCo, you can co-create, code, and collaborate with peers in real-time across a variety of languages (such as Scratch, p5.js, and others). It also has built-in live audio and video for both remote and in-person co-creation experience. We’ll explore how you can use CoCo to program multiplayer games, collaborative art, stories, animations, music, and also physical computing projects with hardware devices such as Micro:bit and Makey Makey. Link to a short video of the platform in action: https://bit.ly/mit-coco-video About the session leaders: Shruti Dhariwal and Manuj Dhariwal are co-creators of CoCo and doctoral researchers at MIT Media Lab. Their work and research has been featured in MIT News and EdSurge, with young people and educators from 85+ countries signing up for CoCo. Their recent work on “Little Language Models,” an upcoming hands-on AI education microworld within CoCo, was featured by MIT Technology Review.

C16134: Making AI unmagical—Build your own ‘Little Language Models’ and create generative stories, music, art, game level creator, and more! in Splash 2025 (Mar. 15 - 16, 2025)

Curious? Watch ‘Little Language Models’ in action here: https://bit.ly/little-models Little Language Models is a hands-on AI education microworld within CoCo (coco.build)—a new co-creative platform for young people (that builds on top of Scratch). In this session, you’ll get to explore the powerful ideas of probabilistic thinking, modeling, and learning that underlie Generative AI systems and Large Language Models like ChatGPT, through building your own little models. Add your own little data like images, sounds, or text to co-create a variety of playful probabilistic projects with peers—such as generative stories, music, and art; interactive visualizations; teaching a computer how to draw; and more! Little Language Models was recently featured by the MIT Technology Review. About the session leaders: Shruti Dhariwal and Manuj Dhariwal are doctoral researchers at MIT Media Lab, and co-creators of CoCo and Little Language Models. Their work and research has been featured in MIT Technology Review and EdSurge, with young people and educators from 85+ countries signing up for CoCo.

C15783: Build Together on CoCo — Multiplayer Games, Interactive Video, Collaborative Art, Physical Computing, and more! in Splash 2023 (Nov. 18 - 19, 2023)

CoCo (https://coco.build) is a new platform being developed at MIT that lets young people engage in an endless variety of collaborative creative coding experiences, WITH PEERS IN REAL-TIME! It supports a variety of expressive computational environments that include both block-based and text-based coding (building on top of Scratch 3.0 and p5.js). In this session, you’ll get to explore firsthand the beta version of the platform and try all the exciting new features and co-creative possibilities! CoCo has been featured in MIT News (https://bit.ly/coco-mit-news) and young people and educators from 75+ countries have joined the invite list to use the platform. CoCo is being co-developed by Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal, PhD students at MIT Media Lab in the Lifelong Kindergarten Research Group (where the Scratch programming platform was originally developed).

C13783: Let's Chance: Learn and Play with Probabilistic Coding in Scratch in Spark 2020 (Mar. 14 - 15, 2020)

Come and explore the new Let’s Chance extension in Scratch, and tinker with ideas of probability and randomness by creating projects with an element of unpredictability! Using the extension’s new code blocks, you can now create a virtual dice in Scratch with any number of sides—each side can be a sound, costume, text, number, or even some real world data. You can dynamically change the chance and likelihood of different outcomes, and make your projects react differently each time you roll one or more dice. Hook the extension with other Scratch extensions such as, Video Sensing, Music, or Text-to-Speech for lots of playful possibilities. Create projects like— generative music, art, or text; chance-based games/stories/animations; interactive visualizations; teaching a computer how to draw, and many others!

C13381: ‘Let’s Chance’ - Learn and Play with Probabilistic Coding in Scratch in Splash 2019 (Nov. 23 - 24, 2019)

Come and explore the new ‘Let’s Chance’ extension in Scratch (scratch.mit.edu), and tinker with ideas of probability and randomness by creating projects with an element of unpredictability! Using the extension’s new blocks, you can now create a virtual dice in Scratch with any number of sides—each side can be a sound, costume, text, number, or even some real world data. You can dynamically change the chance and likelihood of different outcomes, and make your projects react differently each time you roll one or more dice. Hook the extension with other Scratch extensions such as, Video Sensing, Music, or Text-to-Speech for lots of playful possibilities. Create projects like—chance-based games/stories/animations; generative art/text/music; interactive visualizations; data-based simulations; teaching a computer how to draw, and many others!