What is CERES

CERES will bring leading scholars and designers together with emerging leaders, promising junior specialists, and entrepreneurs to shape the future of educational and child-focused technologies. To ensure that substantial progress is made not only in this decade but also well into the future, the network will focus heavily on training and collaboration activities, inviting mid-career and senior members of the community to reimagine their work in light of network goals while enhancing opportunities and knowledge for junior participants. In particular, we will seek to develop a forward-looking training plan that provides opportunities for co-mentorship across disciplines, organizations, and nations. This training plan will build capacity to support reproducible and robust science and innovative solutions for the thorny challenges of the current and future global context. We will also seek to facilitate rapid-response research funding for evidence-based and high-impact research, alongside carefully curated opportunities for industry partnerships and data sharing. This research plan will build capacity to support translational science that not only moves the field forward but speaks to the real needs and priorities of corporate, start-up, non-profit, and governmental agencies.

Measuring and producing positive impacts on children’s learning and development in digital spaces will require large investments in team, evidence-based, interdisciplinary, translational, and reproduceable science. CERES will ensure that the next generation of scientists and leaders in the broad areas of educational and child-focused technology will know how to work together on impactful research. By working across disciplinary and organizational boundaries, this network will shape the next phase of research, innovation, and evidence-based commercial products in this space. Finally, by engaging stakeholders from both scientific and corporate entities through intentional training events, personnel exchanges, and collaborative research, the CERES network will bridge the divide between research and product, closing a key gap that inhibits progress in current models.