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A line art sketch that Layne Jackson Hubbard drew while at the National Head Start Association's annual Headtsarter conference. A figure of a child with the words"E.C." for early childhood. A cloud behind the child with the words "A.I." for aritificial intelligence.

You may have noticed that I like to draw. I'm autistic, and like many people — sketching helps me learn.

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How might we use computation to dive deeper into our creations and inventions? Could it strengthen our brains?

Young children are wildly creative. Building tools for kids can support their inventions and healthy development too.

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My work on MindScribe won the OpenIDEO Early Childhood Innovation Prize for our ability to "maximize potential in the first few years of life."

We're building interactive robots to help preschoolers tell stories about their creative play.

A line art sketch that Layne Jackson Hubbard drew while at the National Head Start Association's annual Headtsarter conference. A figure of a child with the words "A.I. and Early Childhood." In the cloud behind the child are a collection of words from the Headstarter Networks discussion on the theme, including dignity, agency, and multisensory.
A line art sketch that Layne Jackson Hubbard drew while at Dr. Leah Beuchley's ATLAS talk on "Making Material Interactions."

Leah Buechley, inventor of the LilyPad Arduino for wearables, gave a talk at the ATLAS Institute on "Making Material Interactions". I was intrigued by her vision for computational design—how can we support people making things for themselves and their communities?

A photo of Layne Jackson Hubbard and a young child. They were working together with a stuffed animal robot to prototype and storytelling voice interaction.

To develop MindScribe, I collaborate with young children. Here, a 7 year-old and I use Wizard-of-Oz techniques with a stuffed animal to prototype a conversational agent. After she talked with the stuffy to tell her story, she said she wanted to turn it into a book — so we did!

A line art sketch that Layne Jackson Hubbard drew while at Dr. Laura Devendorf's talk at CU Boulder's Information Science seminar. Her talk is titled "Designed Tools for Necessary Frustration."

Laura Devendorf gave a talk at the Information Science Seminar on "Designing Tools for Necessary Frustration." How does technology shape our relationships? How can we explore enchantment and ethics in our designs?

A photo of two young children drawing enthusiatically on a whiteboard filled with scribbles.

Two sisters visit our MindScribe headquarters and do some sketching of their own. I wonder what they're making?

A line art sketch that Layne Jackson Hubbard drew while at Abigale Stangl's doctoral dissertation talk on "Tactile Media Consumption and Production by and for People who are Blind and Visually Impaired."

In her doctoral dissertation, my classmate Abigale Stangl focused on "Tactile Media Consumption and Production by and for People who are Blind and Visually Impaired." How might we create more dimensionality in our media, and transcribe across our senses?

A line art sketch that Layne Jackson Hubbard drew while at Dr. Clayton Lewis' ATLAS seminar talk on "Why Can't Programming be like Sketching?"

My mentor Dr. Clayton Lewis wonders "Why Can't Programming Be Like Sketching?" at an ATLAS Institute talk. He seeks to "heal the split" between crafts and fine art by exploring the centrality of gesture in embodied cognition.

A photo of Layne at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta. She stands in front of a lifesize portrait of Jim Henson and mirrors his pose—arms raised while holding a puppet and puppeteering.

In 2018, I traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to visit Jim Henson's collection of puppetry artifacts at the Center for Puppetry Arts. I learned about their creative process and how puppetry has inventive ways to prototype complex dynamics.

P.S. To keep reading, check out my work on MindScribe or my trip to the LEGO® headquarters.

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