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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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Human Dynamics team tops Fragile Families Challenge

Media Lab researchers win three of six categories in inaugural contest.
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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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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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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…
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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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PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
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Cultivating Creativity during the Coronavirus Crisis

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

Ethics Initiative
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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…
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Can a screen-free robot teach coding—and build character?

Alum Marina Bers on Seymour Papert, STEM, Kibo, and Scratch Jr.
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Teachers, the robots are coming. But that's not a bad thing

Can robots help teachers improve classroom learning?
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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.”
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Will AI really transform education?

Promoters show off promising applications of the technology, but AI is not changing the world quite yet
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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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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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Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
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Artificial listener with social intelligence

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

CE 2.0
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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…
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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.
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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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Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
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Music, Mind and Machine

How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
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Robots, Gender, and the Design of Relational Technology

My latest research in Cynthia Breazeal's Personal Robots group has been on relational technology.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Social Computing

Creating sociotechnical systems that shape our urban environments
e-markets
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Future Storytelling
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Research
Code Next

Code Next : Cultural Resonation
Consumer Electronics Laboratory
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Scratch Memories

Scratch Memories is a web-based visualization tool that empowers children to celebrate and reflect on their creative journey with Scratch.&…
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Andorra | Energy + Environment

View the main City Science Andorra project profile.
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A-pops

A design project done in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and the Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), Mexico City's e…
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Andorra | Innovation

View the main City Science Andorra project profile.The MIT Media Lab's City Science research group, the University of Andorra, and national…
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
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Family Creative Learning

In Family Creative Learning, we engage parents and children in workshops to design and learn together with creative technologies, like the …
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Realtime Detection of Social Cues

Realtime detection of social cues in children’s voicesIn everyday conversation, people use what are known as backchannels to signal to some…
Publication Research

Measuring Young Children’s Long-Term Relationships with Social Robots

Kory Westlund, J. M., Park, H., Williams, R., & Breazeal, C. (2018). Measuring Young Children’s Long-term Relationships with Social Robots. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC). ACM: New York, NY.
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Hands-On Ecology: Fostering Neuroinclusivity in STEM Education

What counts here—first and last—is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing. Seeing here implies Schauen [to see] (as …
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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 …
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Electronic Publishing

How to distill meaning from complex everyday experiences.
Publication Research

Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling

Hae Won Park, Mirko Gelsomini, Jin Joo Lee, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2017. Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '17).
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.
Thesis Research

A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions

Jin Joo Lee. A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017.