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About

Marina Umashi Bers is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of early childhood education, computational thinking, and educational robotics. Her work focuses on how young children — from pre-kindergarten through early elementary school — develop programming skills, and how thoughtful curriculum and tool design can make technology education both accessible and equitable. Bers has made significant contributions to understanding how user interface design shapes children's mastery of computational concepts, as demonstrated in her widely cited 2017 study (146 citations), which revealed critical links between interface choice and learning outcomes. A recurring and vital thread throughout her research is gender equity in STEM: her investigations into performance differences between girls and boys in robotics and programming tasks (136 citations) and the influence of teacher gender on girls' outcomes (2018) shed important light on systemic barriers facing young female learners. Her curriculum development work, including robotics integration in Montessori classrooms and pre-kindergarten settings, has shaped real-world classroom practice internationally. With research spanning VEX Robotics competitions to foundational coding instruction, Bers has become a defining voice in making computational education inclusive, developmentally appropriate, and impactful from the earliest years of schooling.