Faculty Research & Scholarly Work
Coding for Animals Key to Engaging Children in STEM
Jessica Cantlon , the Ronald J. and Mary Ann Zdrojkowski Associate Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychology, and her colleague Caroline DeLong, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, merged a topic that younger children (grades 3 to 6) enjoy — animals — with one that most kids might look at like a plate of steaming Brussels sprouts — computer coding.
WATCH A VIDEO ABOUT THE PILOT STUDY AND STUDENT EXPERIENCES WITH CODING.
They developed an educational program in collaboration with the Primate Portal, an exhibit at the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, N.Y., in which the public can watch olive baboons solve problems presented as computerized tasks on a touchscreen computer.
Through the program, students learned a basic coding language (Scratch) to develop a game that olive baboons at the zoo play to test their intelligence. While the students have the freedom to create their game, they are given different frameworks as a starting point, such as a matching game or a search game, like “Where’s Waldo.” At the end of the five-day programming course, the students took a field trip to the zoo to watch the primates play the games they programmed.
Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences | Carnegie Mellon University 28
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