CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Parents and children can help scientists understand how the young mind grows and changes-all from home! Children Helping Science (childrenhelpingscience.com) from the Parent Researcher Collaborative connects families to hundreds of web-based studies of child development and brain function.
“It’s like the Hubble telescope of child development,” says Laura Schulz, Ph.D., an MIT researcher who is one of six lead partners on the project. “There were telescopes before Hubble, but no common resource that allowed such a deep, focused exploration. In the same way, Children Helping Science is a massive leap forward for research on cognition, a new platform that will transform the field.”
For parents, using the website is easy: from the homepage select the age of your child to see a list of studies, then choose the studies you’re interested in. There are studies for children of all ages as well as parents. All the activities are entirely online, so they can be done at any time of day – whenever works best for the child’s schedule.
By aggregating dozens or hundreds of studies in one place, the project aims to greatly increase the number of people who participate. “Finding enough children is always the greatest hurdle in a study,” says Schulz, who also anticipates that having studies more easily accessible will help bring in new participants, especially from families who might not have time or resources to travel for studies in person.
The website welcomes any researcher to list their study. The site was created and managed by Elizabeth Bonawitz at Rutgers University-Newark; Hyowon Gweon at Stanford; Julian Jara-Ettinger at Yale; Candice Mills at the University of Texas Dallas; Laura Schulz at MIT; and Mark Sheskin at Minerva Schools.
Learn more at: https://childrenhelpingscience.com/
Image downloads with permission to reproduce (Dropbox links):
* Family using computer: https://bit.ly/chs-image
* Children Helping Science https://bit.ly/chs-logo
Twitter: @helping_science #ChildrenHelpingScience
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChildrenHelpingScience
Related link: https://childrenhelpingscience.com/
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