[lookit-research] Lookit and Children Helping Science

[Melissa Kline]

Dear Lookit research community/CHS community -


(And apologies for those of you who may be getting two very similar
emails!)

I’m writing with some exciting news - Lookit <https://lookit.mit.edu/>
and Children
Helping Science <https://childrenhelpingscience.com/> are joining forces!
The reason we are writing today is to introduce the research communities to
each other, and to begin learning about your thoughts, ideas, or concerns
about how we’ll be working together.

Nothing about how either site works or appears will be changing today, and
we are keenly interested in making sure that any changes we do make will
continue to serve the researchers who have put so much time and effort into
designing and recruiting studies on both sites.

For those of you who haven’t used Children Helping Science before, it’s a
website launched in early 2020 as a response to the COVID pandemic by
the Parent
Researcher Collaborative <https://childrenhelpingscience.com/parc>. Its
primary purpose was to help as many labs as possible quickly move their
developmental research online, supporting as many different kinds of online
research as possible. It has been very successful in providing a shared
platform for researchers to advertise their studies to interested families,
and gives researchers a lot of control over their communication and study
workflows with participants.

The leadership of these two platforms has always overlapped, and although
each platform has a somewhat different focus, we believe that there are big
benefits to working together more closely. The first would be to simplify
the experience for both families and researchers: right now, families go to
two websites with partially overlapping lists of studies, and researchers
who want to recruit from the widest possible audience have to manage two
separate postings. The second would be to reduce the cost of making
improvements (building just once instead of twice) and make sure that these
improvements reach all researchers and families. Finally, the research
community will be able to work together more closely to share ideas and
solve technical and scientific problems, using Lookit’s existing Slack
space.

Right now, you can help us by sharing any thoughts
<https://forms.gle/CwtJAWe8CjyCMzpD8> you have about either CHS, Lookit, or
the combination of the two. The leadership teams of both CHS and Lookit are
hard at work planning this collaboration, and we look forward to hearing
from you!

Best,

The Lookit & Children Helping Science Teams

Melissa Kline Struhl (Lookit Executive Director)

Laura Schulz (PI, MIT Early Childhood Cognition Lab, Lookit’s home)

The Parent and Researcher Collaborative (PARC): Elizabeth Bonawitz, Hyowon
Gweon, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Candice Mills, Laura Schulz, and Mark Sheskin



-- 
Melissa Kline Struhl
Lookit Executive Director
Research Scientist, MIT Brain & Cognitive Sciences
mekline at mit.edu
https://lookit.mit.edu/ <http://lookit.mit.edu>
http://www.melissaklinestruhl.com/ <http://www.melissakline.net>
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