Play, Connect, Innovate: Using Active Play and Culture to Inspire STEM
Parents are a child’s first educators. For decades, companies like PBS have provided families with TV-based activities to introduce basic math and literacy skills. With the shift towards tablets and smartphones, this project aims to harness smartphone technology to offer parents that promote joyful science learning and foundational scientific knowledge. In collaboration with Health Hip-Hop™ educational technology company, the project team is designing interactive science lessons that incorporate augmented reality, following the ‘Watch, Play, & Explain’ format. Students will watch an animated character, PJ Panda, perform a physical task. Accompanied by music, PJ will explain the concept and encourage young learners to participate in the activity. During the ‘Play’ phase, students will interact with an augmented reality version of PJ Panda, engaging in the activity alongside him. Parents are encouraged to record their children as they play and learn with the AR character. In the final stage, families will sit together and work with their young learner to discuss what was learned, using a lesson plan provided by us. The goal is to offer turnkey, play-based AR science lessons that foster a joyful engagement with science.
Research Team: Bryan Brown
Finding Joy in Learning: A Positive Deviant Analysis of Schools Where Students Demonstrate Exceptional Support and Engagement
The goal of this project is to analyze existing survey data from hundreds of schools to identify “positive deviants” of joyful learning — schools where students report exceptional support, a love of learning, and engagement — and to share the analysis in the form of case studies to educators, school leaders, and the educational community in order to lift up examples for others to learn from. The researchers will use quantitative data analysis of existing data from the Challenge Success Stanford Survey of School Experiences to select a subset of “positive deviant” schools, followed by qualitative research (interviews, observations, and focus groups) with these school communities to explore and describe the practices and their underlying ethics that may be related to these outcomes. Finally, researchers will share findings broadly to inspire and guide other schools in adopting effective strategies.
Research Team: Christina Krist, Denise Pope, Sarah Miles, Ryan Fuller
Joyful Mathematics through Data Investigations (JoMaDI)
Learning mathematics is important to students’ lives, but many students have a negative experience of mathematics, with cascading negative impacts for society. Research conducted over decades has shown a different approach to teaching and learning is possible, one that is joyful, collaborative, and connected, but it is rarely found in classrooms. A new possibility for impactful change comes from the integration of data investigative units into the teaching of mathematics. The researchers will document cases of joyful learning of mathematics through data in fourth-grade classrooms, unpacking key aspects of the teaching and learning interactions.
Research Team: Jo Boaler, Judith Fan, Jack Dieckmann
Empowering Students as Community Change Agents: Advancing Both Joyful Learning and Health Equity through Citizen Science
This community-engaged project will pilot new curriculum and novel tech integration within the evidence-informed Stanford Our Voice citizen science program. In collaboration with the San Mateo County Office of Education, the researchers will evaluate a joyful learning-enabled standards-aligned health equity curriculum across 3-5 low-income middle & high schools. The researchers will assess whether joyful learning-enabled enhancements (e.g., novel technologies) create increased teacher and student interest and engagement along with measurable changes in school-relevant environments and policies aimed at promoting increased health.
Research Team: Zakaria Doueiri, Abby King, Ankita Kaulberg, Sofia Portillo, Ines Campero, Jo Boaler
Testimonios Para Sobrevivencia: Joyful Immigrant Family Storytelling During Politically Perilous Times
This project explores how immigrant families engage in joyful storytelling practices during Trump’s upcoming second presidential term. Marked already as a period in which mass deportation and detention is carried out throughout the U.S., immigrant families remain joyful and resilient. This joy resonates despite public narratives that drive toward fearmongering. Through a year-long case study of immigrant families engaging in digital storytelling, this project will illuminate how joy manifests and persists in particularly trying political periods.
Research Team: Antero Garcia
Learning Joy in Jewish Education
This project will examine how American Jewish teenagers employ positive affect as a feature of how they learn to be Jewish. To explore joy in Jewish education, the researchers draw first on the argument that emotions are cultural constructions defined by their community of origin; second, on the understanding that emotions offer learners an important set of tools for cognitive labor and problem-solving; and third, on the premise of “knowing” as a felt state; though attributed to cognition, people experience the “feeling of knowing.”
By attending to the felt dimensions of Jewish teen education, the researchers hope to better understand how people learn to participate in Jewish life, as well as the connections between emotion and identity. By focusing on the positive affective aspects of Jewish learning, the project aims to identify how emotion mediates both the process of learning to be Jewish and the feelings associated with being Jewish.
Research Team: Ari Kelman
The WOW Project: Wonders Of The World through Virtual Reality for Hospitalized Children
Hospitalized pediatric patients are unable to leave the hospital to engage in traditional learning environments. Patients often feel depressed, disconnected from learning, and socially withdrawn. The Stanford Chariot Program will collaborate with the Palo Alto Unified Hospital School at Stanford Children’s Health to reignite patients’ emotional well-being through learning. The WOW Project aims to use virtual reality (VR) to travel with hospitalized children to the Wonders of the World (WOW). Combining this immersive learning modality with complementary hands-on activities at the bedside, the research team will transport them from their hospital room into a nurturing virtual environment to stimulate their emotional, mental, and social growth while they are physically healing. The researchers will evaluate their overall joy and awe of learning by using standardized emotional scales.
Research Team: Thomas Caruso, Kathy Ho, Faith Collins
From Punishment to Joy: A Case Study of Alternative Education Practices and Policies that Foster Joyful Learning for the Most Vulnerable Students
Opportunities for joyful learning are not equitably distributed in US schools, giving low-income, minoritized youth fewer opportunities for creativity, exploration, and culturally sustaining pedagogy than other students. Alternative schools create personalized, joyful learning environments with youth most marginalized by the education system but are often overlooked in research and policy. In this project, the researchers will conduct a qualitative case study examining both youth perspectives on how they experience joy in classrooms as well as the district- and school-level policies that enable joyful practice. This research will yield lessons for the spread and scaling of joyful learning from pockets of excellence to systems.
Research Team: Tom Dee, Sebastian Castrechini, Jorge Ruiz de Velasco, Curtiss Sarikey
Autonomous block programming play communities as a global lens into joyful learning from late childhood to early adolescence
The research team is collaborating with the leadership of the Scratch Foundation, as well a team of Stanford students from the Educational Data Science program, to investigate Scratch as an exemplar of joyful learning around the world. This block programming platform is autonomously sought out and engaged by millions of youth ages 8–16 to play, explore, express, build, and share ideas and learning experiences.
The researchers plan to recruit a group of Scratch “super users” from 14 countries around the world and conduct interviews on how a series of constructs, already outlined by scholarship on joyful learning, has played out in their own lived experience with Scratch. The resulting insights will inform a natural language processing (NLP) sentiment analysis project aimed at identifying hallmarks of joyful learning present in Scratch’s database of over 100 million projects. The interview and NLP work will guide a final project designed to better identify and understand what aspects of project creation are associated with joyful learning.
Research Team: Bruce McCandliss
Defining and assessing the transformative outcomes of decolonial environmental learning in Palau
This project examines the transformative outcomes of environmental learning rooted in Indigenous knowledge and cultural identity, focusing on Palauan high school students participating in the “Decolonizing Environmental Social Science Research” class co-led by Ebiil Society and the Social Ecology Lab. Building on four years of collaboration, this year-long, student-led research initiative engages youth in documenting local ecological knowledge through intergenerational storytelling and community-based research practices. While students have shared powerful personal narratives of cultural reconnection, increased self-efficacy, and community engagement, these outcomes remain formally undocumented and unevaluated.
Through this seed grant, the researchers aim to co-develop a decolonial, culturally grounded framework for assessing transformative learning in Indigenous environmental education. This includes exploring how youth experience shifts in identity, belonging, and connection to place and community, and how these outcomes can be measured in ways that honor Palauan epistemologies. The findings will contribute to a broader effort to rethink environmental learning outcomes beyond conventional metrics and support Indigenous-led educational practices.
Research Team: Nicole Ardoin, Caroline Ferguson, Alison Bowers, Ann Singeo
Joyful Self-Surprise as an Engine for Learning in Early Childhood
While all children start as novice learners, they soon begin to succeed on novel tasks they did not know they could. What cognitive mechanisms underlie these joyfully surprising experiences, and how do they affect further learning? The researchers will address these questions by designing tasks that reliably elicit such joyful “self-surprise” and examine how such experiences promote children’s curiosity, challenge-seeking, and exploration of their own capabilities. This work will contribute to an understanding of what sparks children’s desire to learn, both about themselves and the world.
Research Team: Hyowon Gweon, Judith Fan, Junyi Chu, Adani Abutto
