Research Projects
We engage in multidisciplinary, iterative, and evidence-based research and development with diverse stakeholders to create new technologies, activities, practices and programs for real-world impact in homes, schools, afterschool programs and online communities. A list of publications for these projects can be found here.
AI & Growth Mindset
GANPaint for Kids
BeaverWorks at MIT
Conversational AI with Zhorai
Creativity with Scratch and AI
Primary School AI for K-2nd Grade
AI & Data Privacy Activities
PopBots: Early AI Education
Primary School AI for 3-5th Grade
At-Home AI Conversations
Selected Publications
AI Education Peer-reviewed Research Articles and Preprints
Learning to program conversationally: A conversational agent to further democratize programming
Van Brummelen, J., Yeo, C., & Weng, K. (2019). Learning to program conversationally: A conversational agent to further democratize programming. 14th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED2020).
A Semantics-based Model for Predicting Children’s Vocabulary
Grover, I., Park, HW., & Breazeal, C. (2019). A Semantics-Based Model for Predicting Children’s Vocabulary. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19), 1358–1365.
Conversational Agents to Democratize Artificial Intelligence
Van Brummelen, J. (2019). Conversational Agents to Democratize Artificial Intelligence. 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 239-240.
The Popstar, the Poet, and the Grinch: Relating Artificial Intelligence to the Computational Thinking Framework with Block-based Coding
Van Brummelen, J., Shen, J.W., & Patton, E.W. (2019). The Popstar, the Poet, and the Grinch: Relating Artificial Intelligence to the Computational Thinking Framework with Block-based Coding. Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Thinking Education, 160-161.
A Model-Free Affective Reinforcement Learning Approach to Personalization of an Autonomous Social Robot Companion for Early Literacy Education
Park, HW., Grover, I., Spaulding, S., Gomez, L., & Breazeal, C. (2019). A Model-Free Affective Reinforcement Learning Approach to Personalization of an Autonomous Social Robot Companion for Early Literacy Education. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 33, 687–694.
PopBots: Designing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum for Early Childhood Education
Williams, R., Park, HW., Oh,L., & Breazeal, C. (2019). PopBots: Designing an Artificial Intelligence Curriculum for Early Childhood Education. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 33, 9729–9736.
Can Children Learn Creativity from a Social Robot?
Ali, S., Moroso, T., & Breazeal, C. (2019). Can Children Learn Creativity from a Social Robot?. Proceedings of the 2019 on Creativity and Cognition, 359-368.
A is for Artificial Intelligence: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Activities on Young Children’s Perceptions of Robots
Williams, R., Park, HW., & Breazeal, C. (2019). A Is for Artificial Intelligence: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence Activities on Young Children’s Perceptions of Robots. Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–11.
A Social Robot System for Modeling Children’s Word Pronunciation
Spaulding, S., Chen, H., Ali, S., Kulinski, M., & Breazeal, C. (2018). A Social Robot System for Modeling Children’s Word Pronunciation. Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (Socially Interactive Agents Track), 1658-1666.
Learning to Program Conversationally: A Conversational Agent to Further Democratize Programming
Patton, E.W., Druga, S., & Van Brummelen, J. (2018). Panel: Block Abstractions for AI. Proceedings of the BLOCKS+ at Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), 1-2.
Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer
Park, HW., Rosenberg-Kima, R., Rosenberg, M., Gordon, G., & Breazeal, C. (2017). Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 137-145.
Affect-Aware Student Models for Robot Tutors
Spaulding, S., Gordon, G., & Breazeal, C. (2016). Affect-Aware Student Models for Robot Tutors. Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multiagent Systems, 864–872.
Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot?
Gordon, G., Breazeal, C., & Engel, S. (2015). >Can Children Catch Curiosity from a Social Robot? Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 91-98.
Developing Middle School Students’ AI Literacy
Lee, I., Ali, S., Zhang, H., DiPaola, D., & Breazeal, C. (2021). Developing Middle School Students’ AI Literacy. Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE’21)
Development of an Instructional Tool for Young Children to Learn AI
Ting-Chia Hsu, Hal Abelson, Natalie Lao, Yu-Han Tseng. (2021). Behavioral-Pattern Exploration and Development of An Instructional Tool for Young Children to Learn AI. Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence, 100012..