Santiago Hurtado

Santiago Hurtado is a doctoral student at the Professorship of Learning Sciences and Educational Design Technologies at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). His work explores the intersection of learning theory, digital youth practices, and educational design. Previously, Santiago earned his Master of Education (M.Ed.) and is a psychologist from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. His international background informs his perspective on how cultural and social contexts influence technology-mediated learning.

Santiago’s research focuses on learner-centered design within STEM+C (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing) education. He is particularly interested in how youth engage with social media risks and artificial intelligence ethics and how digital practices can be leveraged as rich sources of learning and engagement. His approach is grounded in educational and social psychology, aiming to bridge the gap between everyday digital life and educational environments.

His fellowship project aims to move beyond trial-and-error approaches of young people on social media to online safety by creating learning environments where young people can externalize complex interactions between user practices and social media algorithms. Grounded in constructionist learning theory, the project will develop a toolkit of tangible and digital activities to help youth visualize opaque platform features and co-design more transparent, responsible social media architectures. By recontextualizing social media as a tinkerable system, the project seeks to empower youth as critical co-designers and provide an empirical basis for digital literacy initiatives that prioritize user agency.