Serious science at home
The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on mobility and contact has prompted a group of researchers to accelerate development and launch of a website that could transform the field of cognitive development. Children Helping Science is a massive project connecting families to hundreds of online studies of developmental psychology and cognition that they can do from home. “It sounds simple, just channeling developmental research into a single site so that we can pool participants, but in fact, it’s like the Hubble telescope of child development,” says MIT Professor Laura Schulz, 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, by aggregating participants, we can ask and answer questions that would be impossible given just the resources of individual labs. Children Helping Science is a new platform that can help us transform the...