Marina Umaschi Bers

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Prof. Bers is from Argentina, where she did her undergraduate studies in Social Communication at Buenos Aires University. In 1994 she came to the US where she received a Master’s degree in Educational Media and Technology from Boston University and a Master of Science and PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory working with Seymour Papert.

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Prof. Bers received prestigious awards such as the 2005 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor given by the U.S. government to outstanding investigators at the early stages of their careers, a National Science Foundation (NSF)‘s Young Investigator’s Career Award, for her work on virtual communities of learning and care, and the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies. She was also selected by the Boston Business Journal as one of the recipients of its 2015 Women to Watch in Science and Technology awards. Dr Bers loves teaching and in 2016 she received the Outstanding Faculty Contribution to Graduate Student Studies award at Tufts University which recognizes her mentorship. In 2022, she was selected as a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and, in 2023, a Member of the National Academy of Education.

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Since the mid 90’s, Prof. UBers has conceived and designed diverse technological tools ranging from robotics to virtual worlds. She co-developed the ScratchJr programming language in collaboration with Mitch Resnick from the MIT Media Lab and Paula Bonta, from the PICO company. ScratchJr is a free app funded by the National Science Foundation, the Scratch Foundation and a successful Kickstarter campaign. She also developed the KIBO robot kit for children 4 to 7 year old, that can be programmed with wooden blocks without using keyboards or screens old and she co-founded a start-up, KinderLab Robotics, Inc that with funding from the National Science Foundation SBIR program, is commercializing KIBO and making it available worldwide.

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Before coming to Boston College, Marina Bers was professor at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development with a secondary appointment in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She also developed and served as director of the on-line blended graduate certificate program on Early Childhood Technology at Tufts University.

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Prof. Bers’ current research focuses on how robotics and programming languages, can promote new ways of thinking and learning alongside with socio-emotional development, to educate children to think critically, collaborate with others, and develop character strengths to make a better world.

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Prof. Bers is passionate about using the power of technology to promote positive development and learning for young children. Check out her 2014 TEDx talk “Young programmers — think playgrounds, not playpens”.  Bers’ philosophy and theoretical approach  as well as the curriculum and assessment methods can be found in her books “Beyond Coding: How Children Learn Human Values through Programming” (MIT Press, 2022); “Teaching Computational Thinking and Coding to Young Children” (IGI, 2021); “Coding as Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom” (Routledge, 2018; 2020); “The Official ScratchJr Book” (2015; No Starch Press); “Designing Digital Experiences for Positive Youth Development: From Playpen to Playground” (2012, Oxford University Press); and “Blocks to Robots: Learning with Technology in the Early Childhood Classroom” (2008; Teacher’s College Press).