At a science and technology university like EPFL, educational decisions must rely on empirical evidence—identifying which methods work, under what conditions, and why. While this evidence-based approach defines much of my work, it represents only one side of the story.
This lecture highlights the reverse view: how education research itself benefits from EPFL’s engineering culture. Human learning is complex and unpredictable, yet our studies in learning technologies have thrived thanks to computational thinking. Like all sciences, education research stands on two pillars—discovery and invention—which I will illustrate through key projects from the CRAFT and CHILI labs over the past 23 years.