Marina Bers - US grants

The primary goal of the creation of the Robotics Academy is to form a new multi-disciplinary, project-based teaching and learning environment for undergraduate students, involving students from different disciplines in the discovery process and exposing them to the joy of research and design through hands-on experience with real world problems. The Academy will include students (and teachers) from multiple universities (Tufts University and University of Nevada, Reno), giving the students and teachers the opportunity to benefit from specialties at other universities, as well as to collaborate with others remotely over the Internet.


Under the proposed system, junior students from multiple disciplines (i.e., mechanical engineering, electrical engineering/computer science, human factors, biochemistry/chemistry, and child development/education) will join the Robotics Academy, completing their major program of studies through a pre-defined "robotics thread". The "robotics thread" in each discipline consists of a set of courses that introduces the students to robotics and how it applies to their chosen fields. During their two years in the Academy, they will work in a team, composed of four students from different disciplines, on a common robotics project. This project will constitute their undergraduate honors thesis.


Each multi-disciplinary Academy team will work on a robotic project in one of 4 areas: Medical
Robotics, Tele-robotics, Nanorobotics, and Robotic Toys. Medical robotic projects will be led by the responsible faculty in the Academy, in conjunction with surgeons (Tufts School of Medicine and the New England Medical Centre), veterinarians (with Tufts Veterinary School), or occupational therapists (Tufts University Boston School of Occupational Therapy). Through their robotics solution, students in these projects will aim to improve the quality of life of the patient, or improve the safety and productivity for a particular medical application. Tele-robotics projects will introduce students to concepts and applications of remote control and manipulation. This work will be done in conjunction with NASA scientists and will teach students about remote exploration. The Nanorobotics project will put students at the forefront of modern robotics, involving them in the cutting edge of nano-fabrication and control techniques. The final project area will be in the design of educational robotic toys. This project will build on the highly successful collaboration with the LEGO Corporation and the development of ROBOLAB at Tufts.


As a team, each team member will learn from and contribute to the process in the life cycle of the robotic solution. For instance, the mechanical engineering student will work on robot design and fabrication; the computer science/electrical engineering student will design the circuitry and program the intelligence of the robot. The human factors student will design the user interface to ensure safe and effective use, while the pre-service teacher on the team will implement the engineering education outreach efforts.


In addition, senior students in the Academy will act as mentors to junior students from another discipline. This arrangement allows for the students to receive individual attention, while encouraging communication across the disciplines. Each senior will also be responsible for teaching one Academy Hands-On Seminar, an afternoon class in some practical aspect of robotics that will be useful to all students in the academy. For instance, a mechanical engineering senior might offer a course in ProEngineer and CAD, whereas a child development student might offer a class in cognition and learning strategies.

Five robotics projects are planned for the first year, with two new projects being introduced in each subsequent year. Progress of the proposed program will be assessed throughout the three years of proposed funding. Results of the robotics projects will be documented on the Academy website and disseminated at conferences. The Academy is expected to be self-sustaining after three years, through industrial support for individual projects.

This CAREER project aims to develop a research and education program to foster positive and healthy youth development through the use of multi-user, virtual environments called identity construction environments (ICEs), which are hypothesized to foster new kinds of communities of learning and care. One context where such technologies may have the most impact is in situations where youth might otherwise be isolated and in danger of developing mental health-related problems. The PI will work with youth at the Boston Children's Hospital that have suffered severe renal and cardiac failure and who wouldn't otherwise survive without medical interventions such as heart and kidney transplants. An applied developmental model provides a framework to design ICEs. It also provides a model for doing research in complex real world settings. It is hypothesized that ICEs will 1) promote positive youth development (measured as competence, connection, character, confidence, caring and contribution to civil society), 2) complement and augment face-to-face psychosocial interventions, and 3) that the positive effects are due to design features and the nature of online activities that engage youth in cognitive, social and emotional development. Educational activities include research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students in an interdisciplinary research group, service learning in healthcare and community-based settings, new courses and curricula for students from a variety of disciplines: education, mental health, engineering and computer science.

This project will explore new and potentially powerful technological teaching tools for introducing the concepts of computing and physics to children (and teachers). The goal is to broaden the class of students who are not merely exposed to but rather engaged with technology, by empowering children to express ideas with usable tools for creating stop-action and 3D-animated movies, and by developing methodologies for incorporating such tools into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. This effort leverages emerging public fascination for computer animation, as well as recent technological advances that have moved the graphics power of yesterday's million-dollar visualization supercomputers into every desktop PC.

A proof of concept of this approach, based on stop-motion animation, was prototyped by one of the PIs, and initial trials were encouraging. In a high-school physics class for noncollege-bound seniors, students who typically skipped class were now attending, some coming even during free time to complete their movies. Through animations, students were able to critically examine their own understanding of the physics and more effectively convey that understanding to teachers. (The same technique is also being used to teach reading to 7 year olds and biology to 9 year olds, replacing book reports and lab notebooks with animated stories and documentaries.) Informed by that experience, this project will have two arms: one to develop and evaluate teaching methodology based on moviemaking (at Tufts University), the other to create new 3D computer animation tools useable in the classroom (at Princeton University).

Technological teaching tools are often developed in the absence of strong educational research; in this project, the PIs will use accepted metrics (and develop new ones) to quantify the STEM learning improvement in high school physics as a result of using animations, comparing student understanding in conventional "hands-on" physics classes with those that include movie journaling. Results from this work will not only contribute to our understanding of how students learn physics and computing, but will also help bridge the student's experience and intuition with modern scientific theory. Further development of moviemaking tools will allow students to move from the jerky animation of the stop-action world to the smooth animations of modern computer graphics. Unfortunately, existing animation systems are barely usable by professionals, let alone grade-school students. This project will address that research challenge by developing inexpensive and robust 3D scanning hardware, point-and-click animation interfaces, and methods for stylized (e.g. cartoon-like) rendering of 3D animation.

Broader Impacts: Anecdotal evidence from the prototype system (gathered over the last three years in five classrooms) already suggests the potential significant impacts of the work. Science-phobic students and computer-shy teachers enthusiastically argue about the underlying physics to improve their movies. Movie making gives teachers a multi-media portfolio to assess student learning and test student preconceived models. If formal evaluations agree with this experience, the results of this project have the potential to change the way students learn science at all ages, opening up a new channel to students to show their understanding and test their hypotheses. This may lead to innovations in teaching computing, math, biology, chemistry, engineering, and even story telling and literature. (Nonetheless, this study chooses an emphasis on physics education because of established metrics for evaluation in this subject.) Even more broadly, animation represents a new medium of expression - visual rather than written - that is compelling but currently limited to highly skilled professionals. The tools the PI plans to develop in this project will make animation more accessible both to children and, more generally, to everyone outside the animation industry. Making this technology more widely available has the potential to affect the way we all communicate, learn, work, and play, turning us into media developers rather than media consumers.

The focus of this project is on computer programming and robotics in early elementary school, with an emphasis on kindergarten. The goal is to understand what is developmentally appropriate for young children in light of novel human-computer interaction techniques that provide more age-appropriate access to technology. At the heart of this proposal is the claim that, for a variety of reasons, modern graphical user interfaces (GUI) are ill-suited for use in early elementary school, especially for computer programming activities. This project proposes to build on emerging tangible user interface (TUI) technology to create a tangible programming language for young children. That is, rather than using a mouse or a keyboard to write programs to control robots, children will instead construct programs by connecting smart wooden blocks shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces. In a similar spirit, the project proposes to re-envision robotics as an activity having less to do with constructing robots out of expensive and intricate parts (such as LEGOs) and more to do with constructing artistic creations out of arts and crafts goods and recycled materials. Over the course of three years, the project will build on existing research to develop novel technology and a complementary kindergarten robotics-based curriculum. In addition, it will develop a research protocol and experimental tasks in order to study children?s learning in this domain. The project will then evaluate the effectiveness of both the technology and the curriculum in four kindergarten classrooms.

This collaborative project between Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is researching and developing a new version of the Scratch programming language to be called ScratchJr, designed specifically for early childhood education (K-2). The current version of Scratch, which is widely implemented, is intended for ages 8-16 and is not developmentally appropriate for young children. This work will provide research-based evidence regarding young children's abilities to use an object-oriented programming language and to study the impact this has on the children's learning of scientific concepts and procedures. The team will develop ScratchJr in an iterative cycle, testing it in both in the Devtech lab at Tufts and the Eliot Pearson lab school and with a wider network of early childhood partners. At the end of the three-year project, ScratchJr will have been tested with approximately 350 students in K-2, 40 parents, and 58 early childhood educators.

ScratchJr will have three components: 1) a developmentally appropriate interface, with both touch screen and keyboard/mouse options; 2) an embedded library of curricular modules with STEM content to meet federal and state mandates in early childhood education; and 3) an on-line resource and community for early childhood educators and parents. The research questions focus on whether ScratchJr can help these young children learn foundational knowledge structures such as sequencing, causality, classification, composition, symbols, patterns, estimation, and prediction; specific content knowledge; and problem solving skills.

This interdisciplinary proposal makes contributions to the fields of learning technologies, early childhood education and human computer interaction. ScratchJr has the potential for broad implementation in both formal and informal settings.

The project investigates the use of robotics into early childhood education. It address two objectives: to develop and evaluate a low-cost, developmentally appropriate robotic construction kit specifically designed for early childhood education (PreK-2) and to pilot a robotics-based professional development model for early childhood educators to teach engineering and technology. A number of research questions are included. To what extent did participating teachers gained knowledge about robotics, engineering and programming, and pedagogies? To what extent have they increased their familiarity of, comfort with, and understanding of the use of robotics in early childhood? To what extent participating in the institute can support the passage from knowledge to action? What processes/standards are used by early childhood teachers to integrate engineering and technology into their traditional curriculum? Do teachers adopt the robotics kit and curriculum for their classrooms? How do they adapt it to their own practices? What are the factors that predict successful outcomes in terms of adoption and adaptation? To what extent has the teaching practice of the teachers changed in a way that demonstrates understanding of the role of T and E in early childhood education?

Robotics provides a playful bridge to make early childhood programs more academically challenging while honoring the importance of play in the developmental trajectory. The assumption is that young children can become engineers by playing with gears, levers, motors, sensors; and programmers by exploring sequences, loops and variables. Robotics can be a gateway for children to learn about applied mathematical concepts, the scientific method of inquiry, and problem solving. Moreover, working with robotic manipulatives engages children in social interactions and negotiations while playing to learn and learning to play.

For robotics to be successfully integrated into the early childhood classroom, there are three factors that need to be considered: the robotics technology needs to be developmentally appropriate and low-cost; and teachers should be exposed to professional development. This project addresses these issues. It contributes to the emerging field of robotics in education by addressing the needs of an educational segment, early childhood, where there is a lack of new technologies and approaches to teach technology and engineering in a developmentally appropriate way.

Recent research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) generated a broad range of interaction styles that move beyond the desktop into new physical and social contexts. These emerging interaction styles, that are often referred to as Reality-based Interfaces (RBIs), leverage users' developmental abilities such as naive physics, spatial, social and motor skills, and offer concrete ways to think about abstract phenomena. Building on this work and motivated by the need of our nation to further engage children in STEM, this research investigates how to design age-appropriate reality-based interfaces that engage young children in scientific investigations, bio-design, and engineering. The project entails the development of novel human-computer interfaces that encourage children to explore and design within the domain of biological engineering, while facilitating learning of abstract concepts in a concrete way. This approach intends to promote a re-examination of the early childhood STEM curriculum to include emerging and interdisciplinary topics.



The project scope includes the design, implementation, and evaluation of RBIs for young children that support collaborative exploration of biological engineering. The research questions investigated focus on how reality-based interaction techniques can be applied to make the invisible tangible. Specifically, how to design novel interaction techniques that bridge the time and size scales of biology? How to design and implement interfaces that supports collaboration within both pairs and larger groups by integrating computational devices of different scales? How to support seamless transition between macroscopic and microscopic levels of information and across multiple devices? And finally, can RBIs allow young children to grasp abstract concepts that were previously considered too complex for their age and developmental stage? The outcomes of this project contribute to four areas of research: 1) tangible and embodied interaction, 2) computer supported collaborative learning, 3) interaction design for children, and 4) early childhood education in STEM.

Research and policy changes over the recent years have brought a newfound focus on STEM for young children. Policy decisions regarding how and when to introduce computer science education would benefit from additional data. This project will investigate the cognitive and neural basis of learning computer science in early childhood. The project will use functional MRI to evaluate the novel hypothesis that engaging in programming activities can be similar to engaging in language comprehension and production. This project comes at a time when there is a re-envisioning of STEM in early childhood education as well as a push for integrating coding at all levels of the educational system. This empirical project will provide critical insights into the cognitive and neural basis of programming, which is key for furthering the goal to bring computer science for all and the design of learning technologies for young children.

This interdisciplinary project will focus on understanding the cognitive and neural basis of computer programming in young children. Since computer programming is traditionally associated with problem solving it is taught as a STEM discipline. However, the underlying assumption that programming abilities are related to math and general problem solving skills has not gone unchallenged. Some researchers proposed that learning a programming language may also be related to the cognitive processes associated with literacy, akin to acquiring a foreign language. In this interdisciplinary project the research team will use functional MRI to evaluate whether engaging in coding and computational thinking primarily activates the domain-general problem-solving brain regions (the fronto-parietal multiple demand network), and whether it additionally engages the fronto-temporal language network. The team will ask this question by conducting a pilot study with children 8 years of age programming with ScratchJr, an introductory programming language developed by the PI. Understanding whether engaging in computer programming primarily relies on domain-general problem-solving resources or whether it additionally engages language processing mechanisms, will provide critical insights into the cognitive and neural basis of programming, which is needed for understanding learning trajectories in computational thinking, developing effective learning technologies, and making policy recommendations for incorporating the teaching of computer science.