News Article

NSF Supports the Youngest Scientists

Friday, February 17, 2017

EDC's Center for Children & Technology, in partnership with public media leader WGBH Boston, have announced new initiatives to help children from three to five years old gain science and computational thinking skills. Thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation, the initiatives will draw from the popular, award-winning series PEEP and the Big Wide World and the new Monkeying Around series to foster children's engagement with science and computational thinking in their preschool classrooms and in their own homes.

Bringing Science Home with PEEP will investigate and devise new ways to engage families in science exploration through the home visiting programs AVANCE and HIPPY USA. These two programs send educators into families' homes to give parents the skills and tools they need to their foster children's science learning. 

Another initiative, centered on Monkeying Around, will involve research and the production of animated and live-action videos, along with parent-child engagement resources designed to increase preschool computational thinking. "There is a great deal of national interest in computer science and coding," says CCT director Shelley Pasnik. "Computational thinking—such as recognizing patterns and playing with sequences—helps prepare preschool children for more advanced thinking in later years. It's never too early to start!"

For more information about CCT's Bringing Science Home with PEEP project, click here.

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