Marina Umaschi Bers

Dr. Marina Umaschi Bers is the co-creator of the widely-popular programming language, ScratchJr. She is a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Tufts University. She also heads the Developmental Technologies (DevTech) Research group where she studies innovative ways to promote positive childhood development through new learning technologies. Additionally, she created KIBO, a robotics platform for children 4 to 7 which allows young learners to learn programming and engineering skills without screens or keyboards. Dr. Bers is also the director of the graduate Early Childhood Technology certificate program at Tufts University. More her approach that conceives coding as a literacy of the 21st century, can be found in her book Coding as a Playground: Programming and Computational Thinking in the Early Childhood Classroom.