Project overview

Children Helping Science (CHS) is a platform for doing developmental research run by a small academic group at MIT. Our vision is of a collaborative online lab:

  • Large collaborative “online lab” run by group at MIT

  • Single participant interface; shared participant pool, servers; central & shared recruitment in addition to individual labs’ efforts

  • CHS team provides training, IRB coordination, study implementation, design support, ongoing development, documentation

  • Researchers independent, but with centralized approval of studies (covering technical problems, basic compliance with ethical guidelines, and clarity for parents)

  • Support/incentives for best practices (e.g. preregistration, publishing materials and data, clearly demarcating pilot data)

  • Can be funded (at steady state) primarily by participating labs’ usage, although open to alternate models

Mission statement

Lower barriers to conducting and participating in rigorous, reproducible developmental research that advances the understanding of development and its implications for education, parenting, policy, and medicine.

We are committed to

  • Open source development

  • Encouraging data and protocol sharing

  • Encouraging best practices in experimental design

  • Advancing our understanding of methods

  • Recruiting a representative participant pool

  • Respecting participants’ time and parents as partners in discovery

  • Enabling non-traditional developmental researchers and supporting work that benefits children or families

Funding

There are two types of funding for CHS: (1) funding for individual studies and (2) funding for the CHS platform and organization. Each individual study is run by a specific organization (e.g. a lab at a university) and typically funded by the researchers’ own grants or institutional support.

The Children Helping Science team gratefully thanks our platform funders, including:

  • The National Science Foundation (through grants 1122374, 1429216, 1823919, 2209756 and 2346214)

  • The National Institutes of Health (through grant 1RF1MH132747-01)

  • MIT Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM)

  • MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence

  • foundry10

  • The Halis Family Foundation

  • Platform funding from researchers including subawards and platform revenue

  • Individual donations from researchers, parents and other supporters of CHS