Marina Umaschi Bers

Marina Umaschi Bers is the Augustus Long Professor of Education at Boston College. Bers holds a secondary appointment in Boston College's Department of Computer Science. Bers directs the interdisciplinary DevTech Research Group, which she started in 2001 at Tufts University.[1] Her research involves the design and study of innovative learning technologies to promote children's positive development. She is known for her work in the field of early childhood computer science with projects of national and international visibility. Bers is the co-creator of the free ScratchJr programming language, used by 35 million children, and the creator of the KIBO robotic kit, which has no screens or keyboards.[2]

Marina Bers
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology,
Scientific career
ThesisIdentity construction environments : the design of computational tools for exploring a sense of self and moral values (2001)
Doctoral advisorSeymour Papert

Education

Marina Umaschi Bers went to Buenos Aires University in Argentina and received her undergraduate degree in Social Communications (1993). In 1994, she earned a master's degree in Educational Media and Technology from Boston University; she also has an M.S. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] In 2001, she earned a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Laboratory working under the mentorship of Seymour Papert.[3] In 2001 Bers created her research group, the Developmental Technologies, or DevTech, at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University.[2] In 2018 she was named the chair of the Eliot-Pearson Dept. of Child Development.[4]  In 2022 she moved to Boston College as the August Long Professor of Education at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development.[2] Bers received an appointment in Boston College's Department of Computer Science and is an affiliated faculty with the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.[2][3][5]

Bers co-founded KinderLab Robotics in 2013,[6] and has worked with WGBH-TV and PBS on content for children's broadcasting.[1]

Research and work

Bers’ research centers around the potential of technology to foster the development of children. Her early work examined storytelling and language in children,[7] robotics in early childhood education,[8][9] and the development of values in virtual environments.[10] In 2012 she developed the TangibleK robotics program to teach young children about the world of technology.[11] Bers developed the ScratchJr programming language collaboratively with Mitch Resnick, Paula Bonta, and Brian Silverman.[12][13] ScratchJr targets children from ages 5 to 7,[14] and is an offshoot of Scratch which is used to teach programming to children from 8 to 16 computer programming.[15][16] Bers also works to train childhood educators on the use of technology in the classroom[17][18] and develops curriculum that can be used to teach programming and computational thinking.[19] She developed the KIBO robot kit, a robot that young children can program with wooden blocks and serves as a tool to teach children computer programming.[20]

Published books
  • Bers, M. U (2012). Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground. Oxford.
  • Bers, M. U & Resnick, M. (2015). The Official ScratchJr Book. No Starch Press.
  • Bers, M. U & Sullivan, A. (2018) The Official ScratchJr Coding Cards. No Starch Press.
  • Bers, M. U. (2018). Coding as a Playground: Programming and Coding in the Early Childhood Classroom. Routledge.

Awards and honors

In 2005, Bers received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given by the U.S. government to outstanding investigators.[2] She also received a National Science Foundation (NSF)‘s Young Investigator's Career Award, and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.[2][1] In 2015, Bers was chosen as one of the recipients of the Boston Business Journal’s Women to Watch in Science and Technology awards, and in 2016, Bers received the Outstanding Faculty Contribution to Graduate Student Studies award at Tufts University. She was elected fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2022.[3]

References
  1. "CV for Marina Umaschi Bers" (PDF). May 7, 2021. Retrieved December 13, 2021.
  2. Otoka, Isabella (12 December 2022). "DevTech Research Group". DevTech Research Group. Retrieved 12 December 2022.
  3. Bers, Marina (12 December 2022). "Marinabers.com". Marina Bers' Website. Retrieved 12 December 2022.
  4. "Marina Umaschi Bers, PhD | Professor and Chair, Eliot-Pearson Dept. of Child Study & Human Development; Dept. of Computer Science; Director, DevTech Research Group, Tufts University". Retrieved 2021-12-12.
  5. "Marina Bers - Lynch School of Education and Human Development - Boston College". www.bc.edu. Retrieved 2022-12-06.
  6. "Boston Business Journal announces 2015 Women to Watch in Science and Technology honorees". www.bizjournals.com. April 2, 2015. Retrieved 2021-12-12.
  7. Bers, Marina Umaschi; Cassell, Justine (1998). "Interactive Storytelling Systems for Children: Using Technology To Explore Language and Identity". Journal of Interactive Learning Research. 9 (2): 183–215. ISSN 1093-023X.
  8. Bers, Marina Umaschi (2008). Blocks to robots : learning with technology in the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press. ISBN 978-0-8077-4848-0. OCLC 156994433.
  9. Bers, Marina U.; Ponte, Iris; Juelich, Catherine; Viera, Alison; Schenker, Jonathan (2002). "Teachers as Designers: Integrating Robotics in Early Childhood Education". Information Technology in Childhood Education Annual. 2002 (1): 123–145. ISSN 1522-8185.
  10. Umaschi Bers, Marina (2001-10-01). "Identity Construction Environments: Developing Personal and Moral Values Through the Design of a Virtual City". Journal of the Learning Sciences. 10 (4): 365–415. doi:10.1207/S15327809JLS1004new_1. ISSN 1050-8406. S2CID 220461125.
  11. Bers, Marina U. (2010). "The TangibleK Robotics Program: Applied Computational Thinking for Young Children". Early Childhood Research & Practice. 12 (2). ISSN 1524-5039.
  12. "What is ScratchJr?". ScratchJr. Retrieved December 14, 2021.
  13. "Coding for kindergarteners: App teaches kids computer basics". www.cbsnews.com. October 1, 2014. Retrieved 2021-12-14.
  14. Flannery, Louise P.; Silverman, Brian; Kazakoff, Elizabeth R.; Bers, Marina Umaschi; Bontá, Paula; Resnick, Mitchel (2013-06-24). "Designing ScratchJr". Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. IDC '13. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 1–10. doi:10.1145/2485760.2485785. ISBN 978-1-4503-1918-8. S2CID 6439406.
  15. Strawhacker, Amanda; Lee, Melissa; Caine, Claire; Bers, Marina (2015-06-21). "ScratchJr demo". Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children. IDC '15. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 414–417. doi:10.1145/2771839.2771867. ISBN 978-1-4503-3590-4. S2CID 10064947.
  16. Bers, Marina Umaschi (2018). "Coding, playgrounds and literacy in early childhood education: The development of KIBO robotics and ScratchJr". 2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON). pp. 2094–2102. doi:10.1109/EDUCON.2018.8363498. ISBN 978-1-5386-2957-4. S2CID 44071304.
  17. Bers, Marina; Seddighin, Safoura; Sullivan, Amanda (2013). "Ready for Robotics:Bringing together the T and E of STEM in early childhood teacher education". Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. 21 (3): 355–377. ISSN 1059-7069.
  18. Bers, Marina Umaschi; Flannery, Louise; Kazakoff, Elizabeth R.; Sullivan, Amanda (2014-03-01). "Computational thinking and tinkering: Exploration of an early childhood robotics curriculum". Computers & Education. 72: 145–157. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2013.10.020. ISSN 0360-1315.
  19. Bers, Marina Umaschi (2020-10-06). Coding as a Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom (2 ed.). New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781003022602. ISBN 978-1-003-02260-2. S2CID 241551929.
  20. "'Coding is the new literacy': How STEM toys teach kids programming skills". www.msn.com. October 19, 2021. Retrieved 2021-12-13.
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