expertise in research in early childhood education (with a special
focus on research methodologies and evaluation in early childhood
development) to work as a Research Assistant (RA) for an NSF grant
that looks at the role of tangible computer programming in helping
young children learn. This is an interdisciplinary project with the
Computer Science department at Tufts.
The student will commit to a two year RA that will result in either a
Masters 's thesis or a qualifying paper (in the case of a doctoral
student) and will receive a stipend based on the current departmental
rate and his/her experience. He or she will collaborate closely with
students in the Computer Science department and will attend the weekly
DevTech research seminar. No previous knowledge of computer
programming or robotics is needed. However, the student needs to be
willing to learn. Experience conducting literature reviews and working
with Kindergarten-aged children is a plus.
Please send a CV and a couple of paragraphs about your interest in
working as an RA in the DevTech group (http://ase.tufts.edu/devtech/),
and more specifically about your interest in this particular project
to marina.bers@tufts.edu. Project summary is bellow.
Project Summary
This is a challenging time for early childhood education (K-2). On the
one hand, there are steeped up federally-mandated academic demands and
a growing concern to respect children's developmental stages. On the
other hand, there has not been yet a profound re-examination of the
content, in particular in the area of technology, that young children
are able to learn, nor do we have research-based evidence to evaluate
children's developmental possibilities with innovative technologies.
However, in order to advance the technological fluency of our nation's
youth, we need to start in the early years. This project proposes that
when given age-appropriate technologies, young children can actively
engage in computer programming and robotics activities in a way that
is consistent with developmentally appropriate practice. In
particular, it proposes the creation of novel human-computer
interaction techniques to support learning with technology in early
elementary school, with a focus on kindergarten. This technology will
allow us to gather research-based evidence regarding the
intellectually powerful ideas that young children are able to
understand, and build-upon, before reaching what Piaget called the
operational stage. In turn, this will allow us to revisit our
developmental assumptions. 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 classrooms,
especially for computer programming activities. Thus, this project
will focus on two aspects: 1) It will build on emerging tangible user
interface (TUI) technology to create a tangible programming language
for young children to control a robotic artifact. In short, rather
than using a mouse or keyboard to write programs to control robots,
children will instead construct programs by connecting "smart" wooden
blocks shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces; 2) It will integrate
inexpensive building materials such as recyclables, with the use of
select robotic parts, such as wheel and motors that give functionality
and movement. Current robotic construction kits utilize materials such
as LEGO, which can be very expensive and challenging to use for young
children with small hands. Our approach creates a unique opportunity
to separate the intellectual act of computer programming and building
in the physical world, from the confounding factor of modern GUIs and
complex mechanical constructions. And, in turn, provides a means to
build a better understanding of developmental capabilities of young
children with respect to computer programming.
The project team includes experts from the fields of child
development, learning technologies, computer science, and human-
computer interaction from Tufts Unversity. It has an extensive
trajectory in engineering-base educational research through robotics.
Over the course of three years, the project will build on existing
research to develop novel technology and a complementary kindergarten
robotics-based curriculum , as well as a research protocol and robotic-
based experimental tasks that will enable us to carefully study
children's learning. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of
both the technology and the curriculum in kindergarten classrooms by
using the experimental tasks as well as ethnographic methods.
Intellectual Merit
The intellectual merit of this project resides in its potential
contributions to the fields of child development, early childhood
education, and human-computer interaction. From the point of view of
human-computer interaction, the merit of this project lies in the
novelty of the proposed interaction technique as well as the proposed
formal design process and evaluation. From the point of view of child
development and early childhood education, this project proposes to
take an unprecedented look at what young children can accomplish with
technology when given tools that are truly age-appropriate. The
project also proposes a novel methodology for studying young
children's thinking when engaging in programming and robotics.
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