Stefania Druga

Stefania is a graduate student in the Personal Robots research group. Her research focuses on how children interact with and make sense of the growing collection of “smart” inter-connected playthings in the world around them together with their parents and grand-parents. She is exploring how families, as they play with these new devices, develop new ways of thinking about intelligence, emotion, and social interaction. Based on these studies, Stefania hopes to design new tools and activities to introduce families to machine learning and artificial intelligence in a playful way. She is especially interested in how embodied intelligent agents could play an active role in supporting children and their families to learn more about artificial intelligence through playful activities. Previously she co-founded Hackidemia organization (mobile lab for maker Education present in 40 countries), Afrimakers (community of Maker projects in 10 Africa countries) and MakerCamp (global camps for learning how to build and run makerspaces).