Stefania Druga

Stefania is a second-year Master's 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. She is exploring how children, 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 children to machine learning and artificial intelligence in a playful way. She is especially interested in embodied learning and play, providing children with opportunities to develop and program their own body extensions and augmentations.

Stefania grew up on Romania, and graduated from an international Erasmus Mundus master of Media Engineering for Education (France, Spain, Portugal). Before joining the Media Lab, she co-founded Hackidemia (mobile labs for Maker Education in 40 countries), Afrimakers (community of Maker projects in 10 African countries), and MakerCamp (global camps for learning how to build and run Makerspaces).