By Cosmos Institute and Caitlin Morris 

MIT Media Lab artist-educator Caitlin Morris argues that social tinkering—learning through shared experimentation and productive struggle—cultivates the curiosity and resilience that individualized AI tutoring too often overlooks.

Caitlin is a Cosmos Grant recipient in our second cohort whose work focuses on fostering social connection in learning.

I was an unlikely software developer. Sitting alone in my university dorm room as a sophomore, staring at a laptop screen and textbooks filled with code I barely understood, I found myself in tears of both frustration and panic. Nothing was working and I didn’t know why. As someone who had typically excelled academically, this feeling of inadequacy was new and terrifying. Basic computer science concepts like sorting algorithms remained frustratingly abstract, no matter how many hours I spent. My interest in programming hadn't stemmed from any inherent love for computer science, but as a means to an end - I needed it for data collection in cognitive science experiments and computational architectural design projects.