Research
Poetic Justice

Exploring new forms of social justice through art
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Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
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Project Research

ScratchJr

ScratchJr makes coding accessible to younger children (ages 5-7), enabling them to program their own interactive stories, games, and animat…
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Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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ML Learning

ML Learning
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Project Research

PAL: Project on Affinities + Language

The Project on Affinities and Language (PAL) is designed to help us understand what happens in a child’s brain when they engage with their …
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Article Research

Learning interventions for language and literacy

Building on research about deeper social-emotional engagement
Project Research

Child-Driven, Robot-Guided Literacy Activity

 
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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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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…
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…
Post Research

A Counting—Poetic Justice group call for multilingual speakers

Please help Poetic Justice create an artwork that includes all the communities, voices, and languages of NYC.
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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

Curious Learning: Understanding learning behaviors for early literacy

Early literacy plays an important role in a child's future. However, the reality is that over 57 million children have no access to a schoo…
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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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Project Research

Words in Motion

Embodied theories of language propose that the way we communicate verbally is grounded in our bodies. Nevertheless, the way a second langua…
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Project Research

WordSense

As more powerful and spatially aware Augmented Reality devices become available, we can leverage the user’s context to embed reality with a…
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Post Research

Kinesthetic Language Learning in Virtual Reality

Tapping into the physicality of language to enhance the way we learn.
Post Research

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: Understanding …
Publication Research

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.
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Mixing Realities & Language Learning in the Wild

Seamlessly blend what you live with what you learn: mixed reality as a platform for language- learning “serendipitously in the wild."
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Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children's relationships with social robots
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Project Research

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 orientation,…
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Project Research

Robotic Learning Companions

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

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.
Publication Research

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.
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Project Research

Robotic Language Learning Companions

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

They’re having fun… but are they learning?

How can you measure the learning outcomes of play? This has frustrated professionals in the field of early childhood education for years.