“Learn through play” is a simple principle that has guided Marina Bers through her work in computer science and education for years.
Today, she’s developing “smart playgrounds” which intend to teach elementary children computational thinking in a hands-on experience unlike any other. One where children can program slides, swings, and games through play, developed especially for children who are often left behind in educational development.
“We’re bringing computer science education into the playground, and kids can still play outside, play with each other, and develop fully while learning concepts of computational thinking,” Bers, the Augustus Long Professor of Education at the LSEHD with a secondary appointment in the Department of Computer Science, said.
In our society, which is hyper-focused on screen time and technology, children must learn to navigate computational thinking skills at an exceedingly young age, Bers said. While some shy away from exposing children to technology, Bers has always believed that technology has potential to promote positive development and learning for young children.
“I always saw technology as a tool that will help people become better people and better versions of themselves,” Bers said.
In 2001, Bers established the Developmental Technologies Research Group, whose mission statement is to “promote young children’s learning about computational thinking, coding, making, and engineering in a playful, developmentally appropriate way.”
Bers and her DevTech Research Group have worked on numerous projects and received countless awards and accolades for their unique and innovative ideas and research.
Ten years ago they codeveloped ScratchJr, a free introductory programming language that enables young children ages 5–7 to learn coding by creating interactive stories and games. As of August 2023, the app has over 45 million users and has been translated into 48 languages.
“It’s humbling,” Bers said. “It’s amazing to see the creativity of people all over the world”
Bers and her team continued developing new methods of teaching children these concepts, but they wanted a new tool that would keep them off of screens and get them collaborating with their peers.
“[I thought], why don’t we develop a smart playground where kids can develop computational thinking and learn how to code and explore robotics while playing in the actual playground?” Bers said.
The project, funded by a U.S. National Science Foundation Discovery Research PreK-12 grant, began in 2023 and is estimated to take four years.
The first year was primarily focused on exploration and research—collecting data on what kids, parents, and teachers wanted. This included co-design sessions in Santa Ana, Calif., and the Jewish Community Day School in Massachusetts, as well as playground observations at the Boston College Children’s Center.
This year has been focused on physical prototyping and testing based on data and ideas from kids, Bers said. Years three and four will include actual commercial development and implementation of the playgrounds.
The project’s extensive team comes from three different universities: BC, Tufts University, and the University of California Irvine.
“We work with interdisciplinary teams and multi-generational teams,” Bers said. “Teachers and children and parents and researchers—we want to hear everyone’s voices and also different skills. You have the one that understands physics, the one that understands design, and the one that understands robotics and electrical engineering, and the one that knows how to work with the community.”
The UCI School of Education team brings a unique cultural lens foundational to this project. With a specialty in playgrounds themselves and culturally oriented design, their focus has been conducting research with Latino families in Santa Ana, Calif.
“[They] have years of experience working with communities and doing co-design, meaning, what does the community really need, not what the engineers want to build,” Bers said.
The research grant focuses specifically on the cultural values and needs of Santa Ana. The immigrant-heavy and Hispanic-majority community is often left behind in technical innovations, Bers said, leaving children unexposed to computational learning, robotics, and engineering. The smart playground is meant to change this.
“We really care about making an impact in the community,” Bers said. “So the long-term goal will be to co-design with the community something they’re proud of and they think adds value”
The team at Tufts, led by professor of mechanical engineering Chris Rogers and grad student Sophie Hankin, has been collaborating with the BC team to workshop co-design sessions with local students and begin developing prototypes. Soon, they will bring prototypes into the BC Children’s Center classroom and continue designing based on student feedback.
Hankin and her team are currently working on a prototype of a Bluetooth-enabled stuffed animal.
“I’m working on building a small module to stick inside a stuffed animal,” Hankin said. “Each kid gets one of those, and on the module is an accelerometer, so we can track the position of the module. It’ll be able to talk over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to different devices. It’ll have different buttons and lights and a little screen. The idea is that they can connect this module to what we’re calling extensions on other parts of the playground.”
Through conversations with actual kids, the team at Tufts began to envision playground elements such as slide stoplights.
“If someone’s on the slide, the light is red,” Hankin said. “As I get to the bottom, it turns yellow, and then when they’re gone, it’s green. So the kid at the top of the slide knows that it’s their turn to go down.”
Hankin also said the project can enhance traditional playground games like tag.
“If my module and someone else’s module are talking to each other over Bluetooth when we’re far away from each other, our lights are green,” Hankin said. “When we’re close together, our lights are blue, and that way, I can tag my friend and change their color of light, and then they can go do that for someone else.”
Playground elements intentionally emphasize discovery and curiosity rather than instructed, forced playtime, according to PhD student Jessica Blake-West, who’s helping to lead the team at BC.
“The idea is that we’re building tools and modules that kids can use when they’re playing on the playground so that the actual application is determined by the kids,” Blake-West said. “We don’t want to bring this preset game where we have all the settings and all of the rules and every outcome is already determined.”
Blake-West also emphasized that their tech-centric playground is not meant to turn recess into a structured, class-like setting.
“By bringing computational thinking to the playground, by no means do we mean that we’re bringing like, class time and instruction to recess,” Blake-West said. “[We’re] taking whatever class time they’re learning about computational thinking and bringing that to the playground.”
Bers believes this promotion of curiosity and free play is central to teaching children computational learning and computer science skills in a hands-on environment.
“Everything around us is an algorithm,” Bers said. “You know, the news you receive, the ads you get, anything, it’s decided by an algorithm. I believe that children if they’re going to interact in this world, they need to understand what an algorithm is.”
Coding and algorithmic thinking have become a new language that Bers believes every child should have the opportunity to learn.
“It’s really the new literacy,” Bers said. “It’s the literacy of the 21st century. We’re not talking about replacing reading and writing, but it’s adding on coding.”
According to Bers, this new literacy should be accessible to all children, regardless of socioeconomic status.
“If we’re talking about the literacy of the 21st century, well I want to create a language that is free and available for children as well,” Bers said.
But it’s not just making children into future computer scientists or engineers Bers believes in—she has higher aspirations for the future.
“When I think about how I want kids to relate to technology and to learn technology, it’s not so that they can be the best problem solvers in terms of technical skills, but so that they can become better human beings,” Bers said.
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