Research — MIT Media Lab

Fluid Interfaces

Inventing the next-generation mobile device: highly personalized, wearable, and immersive to support our unique needs and goals

Personalized Robot Storytelling Companion

Can social robots collaboratively exchange stories with children as a peer and help improve their linguistic and storytelling skills? Teg...

Affective Computing

Advancing wellbeing using new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion

Human Dynamics team tops Fragile Families Challenge

Media Lab researchers win three of five categories in inaugural contest.

Scratch Memories

Scratch Memories is a dynamically generated, personalized web-based visualization that celebrates a Scratcher’s journey by highlighting t...

Social Machines

Understanding and empowering human networks

ML Learning

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...

Lifelong Kindergarten

Engaging people in creative learning experiences

Ethics

Personal Robots

Building socially engaging robots and interactive technologies to help people live healthier lives, connect with others, and learn better

Scratch

Scratch is a programming language and online community that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, games, and animations–a...

Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children's relationships with social robots

Interactive Inference of Mental States

Social robots take an active role in the inference process by producing social cues to elicit nonverbal responses from children to better...

Montessori Was the Original Personalized Learning. Now, 100 Years Later, Wildflower Is Reinventing the Model

For a classroom of a dozen 3- through 6-year-olds, things are surprisingly quiet inside Wildflower Montessori. The most audible sounds, t...

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Playful Systems

Designing systems that become experiences to transcend utility and usability

The Seeds That Seymour Sowed

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

Code Lab for Anki Cozmo

Anki collaborates with the MIT Scratch Team to bring robotics programming to kids.

SPRING: A Smart Platform for Research, Intervention, and Neurodevelopmental Growth

SPRING is a custom-built hardware and software platform for children with neuro-differences. The system automates data acquisition, optim...

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Social Computing

Creating sociotechnical systems that shape our urban environments

StoryBlocks

Supporting self-expression through story telling and story remixing.StoryBlocks is a mobile application where children can create stories...

Projects, passion, peers and play: Seymour Papert’s vision for learning

Mitchel Resnick—on the power of Papert's ideas for learning.

Relational AI

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

Making new (robot) friends: Further reading

For the interested reader:If you'd like to learn more about the topics covered in my post, Making new (robot) friends: Understandin...

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Children Use Nonverbal Cues to Learn from Robots

When learning from human partners, infants and young children will pay attention to nonverbal signals, such as gaze and bodily orientatio...

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Socially Assistive Robotics: An NSF Expedition in Computing

Our mission is to develop the computational techniques that will enable the design, implementation, and evaluation of "relational" robots...

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Storytelling Companion

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language an...

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Robotic Learning Companions

The language and literacy skills of young children entering school are highly predictive of their long-term academic success. Children fr...

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Kids, AI devices, and intelligent toys

What do children think about machines that think?

Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people

Kory Westlund., J. M., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P. L., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. L. (2017). Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.

Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable?

Kory Westlund, J., & Breazeal, C. (2015). Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable? Workshop on The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction, held in conjunction with the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior

Kory Westlund, J. M., Martinez, M., Archie, M., Das, M., & Breazeal, C. (2016). Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior. In S. Y. Okita, T. Shibata, & B. Mutlu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 688-693). IEEE: Washington, DC.

Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative

Kory Westlund, J., Jeong, S., Park, H. W., Ronfard, S., Adhikari, A., Harris, P. L., David DeSteno, & Breazeal, C. (2017). Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people

Kory Westlund, J., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. (2015). A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people. In Proceedings of New Friends: The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education.

HUBweek Change Maker: Andrew Sliwinski

Completely unexpected moments of expression and creativity can spring from the humble tools we design.

Tega: A New Platform for Long-term Interaction

Tega is a new robot platform designed to support long-term, in-home interactions with children, with applications in early-literacy educa...

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Robotic Language Learning Companions

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and c...

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Advancing Wellbeing

Getting Started with Scratch

Every day, young people around the world use the Scratch programming language to create and share thousands of interactive projects on th...

Microworlds

The MIT Scratch Team is exploring ways to make it easier for newcomers to get started creating with coding. We are designing "microworlds...

Code Next

Foundations : Design of Codified Curricula in Coding, Design, Fabrication, Games, Music, Media, etc.

Foundations (2015 - 2016): The Year 1 MIT/Google collaboration program has Pilot Labs in NYC and Oakland. In the Labs, we introduce a coh...

Team Edge: Design of Codified Curricula in Coding, Design, Fabrication, Games, Engineering, etc.

Team Edge (2016 - 2017): The Year 2 MIT/Google Collaboration. For it, we design and author Curricula and Learning Activities in the follo...

Scratch Extensions

The Scratch extension system enables anyone to extend the Scratch programming language through custom programming blocks written in JavaS...

Play Analytics

Analyzing detailed data from SpeechBlocks to understand how kids engage with constructionist literacy learning technologies, with th...

Duct Tape Network

The Duct Tape Network (DTN) is a series of fun, hands-on maker clubs that encourage young children (ages 7-10) to use cardboard, tape, wo...

After-School Coding Program Comes To Oakland's Fruitvale Neighborhood

Scratch Blocks: Making It Easier to Develop Coding Apps for Kids

We want to empower developers to build great creative learning apps for kids.

Scratch Day

Scratch Day (day.scratch.mit.edu) is a network of face-to-face local gatherings, on the same day in all parts of the world, where people ...

ScratchJr

ScratchJr makes coding accessible to younger children (ages 5-7), enabling them to program their own interactive stories, games, and anim...

Scratch Pad

Scratch Pad is an effort to enable children to create more seamlessly in both the physical and digital world by creating a dedicated phys...

Scratch 3.0

Since the release of Scratch in 2007, young people around the world have programmed and shared more than 15 million Scratch projects . Th...

Can technology help teach literacy in poor communities?

This article originally appeared in the MIT News. Visit the link for more details.For the past four years, researchers at MIT, Tufts Univ...

How software can act as an assistant to the user rather than a tool, by learning from interaction and by proactively anticipating the user's needs.

CE 2.0

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Center for Civic Media

Consumer Electronics Laboratory

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Communications Futures Program

How people and objects can tell tales of their experience and learn from others as they navigate through the vast media fabric made up of intertwining storied threads.

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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 as dogs.

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How to give computers human-like intuition so they can better understand us.

eRationality

How we can understand human behavior (rationality, semi-rationality, bounded rationality, and just plain irrationality) in day-to-day behaviors, and in particular in electronic environments.

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How to engage diverse audiences in creating their own technology by situating computation in new contexts and building tools to democratize engineering.

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How to enhance understanding, enable creativity, and ease our interactions with the technological environment.

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