CAL KIBO @ Horizons for Homeless Children

The CAL-KIBO @ Horizons for Homeless Children project has been a multi-year collaboration to develop and explore the impacts of a robotics program at a multilingual preschool for children experiencing homelessness. For my PhD work, I have been coordinating the project and researching the impact of the program on children and teachers.

Read more about the project Read the paper

Play, Academics, and Coding

My dissertation research focuses on kindergarten teachers' beliefs about play, formal academic learning, and school-readiness as the teachers implement a playful computer science curricula in the United States and Argentina.

MEET-KIBO

The MEET-KIBO program was a collaboration between the DevTech Research Group, Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow, and the International Jerusalem YMCA to explore how coding and robotics can serve as a bridge across ages, nationalities, and languages. For this project, we supported Israeli and Palestinian teenagers in designing and teaching a robotics program for a bilingual kindergarten classroom.

Learn more about MEET-KIBO Read the paper

Early Childhood CS for Children with Disabilities

Individuals with disabilities are underrepresented in STEM and CS fields, but my research has explored how computer science and robotics can serve as an opportunity for success for children with disabilities. An example of this work is in my book chapter, co-authored with Dr. Ziva Hassenfeld at Brandeis and Libby Hunt.

Read the chapter

CAL International

The Coding as Another Language curricula for ScratchJr and KIBO Robotics are play-based curricula for prekindergarten through second grade integrating computer science and literacy, and have been used and researched around the world. I was on the writing team for the curricula, and collaborated on international research and evaluations with The Technion in Israel and Varkey Foundation in Argentina. We presented on the CAL international collaborations at the International Society of the Learning Sciences conference in 2023, and you can read more about the collaborations in the proceedings here:

Read the paper Visit the CAL website

Youth Development Programming

In addition to my research work, I develop informal education and camp programs at the intersection of community issues and STEM practices. This has included a two-week program for rising eleventh grade students at the URJ 6 Points Sci-Tech Academy, and a youth research program at the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism.