About

I’m Sara Jordan Lily Burke (née Thevenow-Harrison). I use she/her pronouns. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

I’m a staff engineer at Launch by NTT Data, formerly Postlight. I work with clients and stakeholders to understand their problems in the context of their domain, refine their scope, build a shared language to describe the problem space, and design enduring and serviceable solutions to fit the client's budget and scope. Read my resume, read my academic CV, connect on LinkedIn, or get in touch.

I make things to help people teach themselves. I design and develop iReadBetter, an app to help children teach themselves how to read, based on materials in Caleb Gattegno’s Words In Color curriculum for the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning.

I also produce educational software. iSpellBetter helps people practice spelling by partially obscuring letter forms under time constraints. iCountBetter helps build and structure children’s sense of quantity and enumeration.

In the realm of social media, I'm most active on Cohost. You can follow me on BlueSky, Twitter, or Mastodon, and you can see my photos on Instagram.

I have a PhD in learning science from the University of Wisconsin—Madison’s Department of Educational Psychology. I wrote this paper about children’s learning and inferences, and helped write this paper about the types of inferences we make and how they develop in children and adults.

My dissertation is about how people learn things unrelated to what they’re doing, and how structuring that “incidental” stuff can change what they learn and how they use it later. It was my attempt at formalizing what happens in discovery learning, but within supervised classification, one of the oldest kinds of learning experiment setups in psychology.