Project Interactions ___

Project Inter-Actions, led by Prof. Marina Bers at the Eliot-Pearson Dept. of Child Development, is a research program that examines the many interactions that exist when parents and young children are brought together in a learning environment fostered by new technologies. In particular, Project Interactions exposes children and parents to experiences that enable them to program and builda robotic toy with Lego pieces and art materials to represent an aspect of the family’s cultural heritage. The project’s name stems from the different types of interactions looked at throughout the research: 1) interactions between adults and children together learning something that is new for both, such as robotic technology, and something that they are immersed into, such as their own cultural background, 2) interactions between abstract programming concepts and concrete building blocks, 3) interactions between ideas of what is developmentally appropriate and what children can and can not do with technology at such early age, and 4) interactions between technology, art, and culture, areas of the curriculum that computers have the potential to integrate.