Project Research

Play Analytics

Analyzing detailed data from SpeechBlocks to understand how kids engage with constructionist literacy learning technologies, with the …
Article Research

Mass STEM Week 2020 Keynote: Prof. Cynthia Breazeal on Teaching Ethical Use of AI

In October, MIT hosted the kickoff for Massachusetts STEM Week, which included a keynote by Cynthia Breazeal.
Article Research

STEM Week event encourages students to see themselves in science and technology careers

MIT hosts kickoff event of Massachusetts STEM Week — a statewide virtual celebration of K-12 education.
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Project Research

Storytelling Companion

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language and …
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Research
Design Fiction

Sparking discussion about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies through design and storytelling
Thesis Research

SCRATCH ♥ MEMORIES: Visualizations that empower children to celebrate and reflect on their creative trajectories

Thesis: Shruti Dhariwal. SCRATCH ♥ MEMORIES: Visualizations that empower children to celebrate and reflect on their creative trajectories. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. September 2018.
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New Media Medicine

How radical new collaborations will catalyze a revolution in health.
Project Research

Scratch

Scratch is the world's most popular coding community for kids. Millions of kids around the world are using Scratch to program their ow…
Project Research

Networked Playscapes: Dig Deep

Networked Playscapes re-imagines outdoor play by merging the flexibility of the digital world with the tangible, sensorial properties of ph…
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Project Research

StoryBlocks

StoryBlocks aims to promote creative expression, literacy development, and social-emotional development through storytelling for children a…
Project Research

SpeechBlocks

SpeechBlocks is a medium that allows children (4-5 years old) to engage in open-ended play with writing. They can build arbitrary compositi…
Post Research

Designing digital workspaces for creativity and collaboration in online project-based courses

Bringing project-based work online in two very different contexts: a middle school robotics course and a university product design studio.
Article Research

Learning about artificial intelligence: A hub of MIT resources for K-12 students

New website offers a combination of learning units, hands-on activities, and mentor guides to foster AI literacy.
Article Research

Wonder Stories: Proven to engage child readers like digital games

Wonder Stories is always free for teachers, but for the duration of COVID-19, Wonder Stories is free to anyone.
Article Research

The Learning Revolution

Mitch Resnick and other experts talk about designing an educational system fit for the future.
Post Research

Family-Friendly Data Privacy + AI Activities: Interactive lessons to help kids learn and design with data privacy in mind

This is a unique time to engage and teach children about the benefits and limitations of technology.
Post Research

Meet the 2017 LEGO Papert Fellows

The LEGO Papert Fellowship program was officially launched in 2017.
Post Research

Meet the 2018 LEGO Papert Fellows

2018 marks the second cohort of the LEGO Papert Fellowship program, which honors the legacy of educational-technology pioneer Seymour Papert
Post Research

Meet the 2020 LEGO Papert Fellows

The new LEGO Papert Fellows will spend one week at LEGO headquarters in Denmark to share ideas and collaborate on projects.
How to build characters that have the everyday common sense, the ability to learn, and the sense of empathy that one finds in animals such a
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Hundred Dollar Laptop
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Digital Life
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Post Research

Human Dynamics team tops Fragile Families Challenge

Media Lab researchers win three of six categories in inaugural contest.
Post Research

MIT launches AI Education website

We understand that now, more than ever, the democratization of online learning is crucial to the success of students all around the world.
Project Research

AI + Data Privacy Activities for K-9 Students

Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are grappling with some herculean questions regarding kids' safety online. Homemade slime…
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Project Research

Primary School AI Education

This Primary School AI curriculum introduces elementary school children to robotics and artificial intelligence. Throughout the curriculum,…
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Project Research

Doodle Bot - Creative AI learning

Doodle Bot is a robot-based creative AI learning platform for high school students. It consists of an introduction to robotics, hardware, s…
Project Research

Robot Mindset and Curiosity

Young Learner's Companion Developing robots' growth mindset and pro-curious behavior and fostering the same in young learners via long…
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Project Research

PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
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Post Research

Cultivating Creativity during the Coronavirus Crisis

The ability to think and act creatively is now more important than ever before.
Article Research

Kids can't be taught, but they love to learn

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxCoeurdalene, an independent event.
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Research
Ethics

Ethics Initiative
Project Research

AI + Ethics Curriculum for Middle School

How do we raise conscientious consumers and designers of AI?Children today live in the age of artificial intelligence. On average, US child…
Article Research

New AI curriculum designed for middle school students

A new curriculum has been designed by MIT researchers and collaborators to teach middle school students about artificial intelligence.
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Media Lab @ Design, Technology + Social Innovation Workshop 2020

The following Media Lab students joined the MIT India Initiative in Mumbai for this workshop.
Article Research

Bringing artificial intelligence into the classroom, research lab, and beyond

MIT Quest for Intelligence shares AI-focused UROP projects, including senior Nicole Thumma's work with the Personal Robots group.
Project Research

Personalized Robot Storytelling Companion

Could a social robot collaboratively exchange stories with children as a peer and help improve their linguistic and storytelling skills? We…
Article Research

Can a screen-free robot teach coding—and build character?

Alum Marina Bers on Seymour Papert, STEM, Kibo, and Scratch Jr.
Article Research

Teachers, the robots are coming. But that's not a bad thing

Can robots help teachers improve classroom learning?
Project Research

Jibo Social Robotic Research Platform

The Jibo Research Platform is an in-the-field deployable Social Robotics experimentation and data collection infrastructure. Built upon the…
Article Research

The Rise of Social Robots: How AI can help us flourish

"I don’t think that AI will have fulfilled its full potential unless it can help us unlock human potential.”
Project Research

Tega: A New Social Robot Platform

Tega is a new robot platform designed to support long-term, in-home interactions with children, with applications in early-literacy educati…
Article Research

Play this bingo game with your kids to teach them about AI

Designed at MIT and tested by kids ages 9 through 14, it shows how exposing kids to technology fosters their interest in STEM.
Article Research

Bringing artificial intelligence and MIT to middle school classrooms

MIT researchers and collaborators have developed an open-source curriculum to teach young students about ethics and artificial intelligence.
Article Research

Discovering You: Engineering Your World - Hae Won Park

Labber Hae Won Park talks to NBC News Learn about how social robots can help children develop language skills.
Article Research

Will AI really transform education?

Promoters show off promising applications of the technology, but AI is not changing the world quite yet
Project Research

Scratch BlockArt

Scratch BlockArt is an experimental visualization tool designed to let children discover their own computational patterns on Scratch. Exist…
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Project Research

Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots Many of our current projects explore the use of…
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Project Research

Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
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Project Research

Artificial listener with social intelligence

A social robot modifies its behavior to change what you think about it!
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Research
CE 2.0

CE 2.0
Project Research

P2PSTORY: Dataset of children as storytellers and listeners in peer-to-peer interactions

Understanding social-emotional behaviors in storytelling interactions plays a critical role in the development of interactive and education…
Article Research

Kids are surrounded by AI. They should know how it works.

A new curriculum that helps children understand how algorithms are designed will keep them safe and motivate them to help shape the future.
Article Research

MIT developed a course to teach tweens about the ethics of AI

Blakeley Payne and Cynthia Breazeal discuss Blakeley’s open source AI curriculum for middle school students.
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Research
Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
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Research
Music, Mind and Machine

How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
Post Research

Robots, Gender, and the Design of Relational Technology

My latest research in Cynthia Breazeal's Personal Robots group has been on relational technology.
Post Research

Generation AI: Teaching a new kind of tech savvy

This summer, the Personal Robots group will be hosting a week-long workshop at the MIT Media Lab to teach kids about AI and ethics!
Project Research

Assessing Children's Relationships with Social Robots

Social robots are increasingly being developed for long-term interactions with children in domains such as healthcare, education, therapy, …
Article Research

Optimize algorithms to support kids online, not exploit them

Joi Ito considers how to best protect children online while encouraging them learn and grow.
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The Seeds That Seymour Sowed

Seymour Papert’s ideas about children, computers, and learning inspired many.
Project Research

Cognimates: Collaborative creative learning with embodied intelligent agents

Cognimates is a platform where parents and children (7-10 years old) participate in creative programming activities in which they lea…
Article Research

Robots are becoming classroom tutors. But will they make the grade?

Mechanical mentors try to find their place as teacher’s helpers.
Article Research

I embraced screen time with my daughter—and I love it

Joi Ito ponders the fearmongering and lack of rigorous research surrounding kids and screen time.
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Project Research

Robot Expressiveness Affects Children's Learning

Prior research with preschool children has established that book reading, especially when children are encouraged to actively process the s…
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Article Research

MIT student develops brain-analyzing wizard hat project

The project can determine what a person is thinking about and use the information to sort them into a Hogwarts house in one test.
Article Research

This MIT post-doc created a sorting hat like the one from ‘Harry Potter’

Nataliya Kos'myna created a “Thinking Cap” that looks like the Sorting Hat from the popular “Harry Potter” series.
Communications Futures Program
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Project Research

Ecology, Evolution, and Engineering for Empowered Brains

EEEeb Spring 2019:  Urban OceansMarch 24, April 7 and 21, May 19, June 2 To register, please visit this link.…
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Research
Social Computing

Creating sociotechnical systems that shape our urban environments