CoCo: A Platform Enabling Young People to Learn Collaboratively in Real-Time

Manuj Dhariwal and Shruti Dhariwal, Ph.D. candidates at the Media Lab, present a novel approach to creative collaboration in online learning settings.

With the help of CoCo, a brand-new co-creative learning platform, educators can involve kids and teenagers in a limitless array of collaborative creative computing experiences with peers, whether seated next to one another in the same classroom or communicating remotely across oceans.

The platform facilitates interactive settings for block-based coding, text-based coding, digital painting, creative writing, and other interactive environments in real-time collaboration. CoCo’s co-creative programming environments are now built upon Scratch 3.0, created at the MIT Media Lab, and p5.js, which Processing influenced, another Media Lab creation.

Ten years of collaborative creativity

The CoCo platform was developed by Shruti Dhariwal SM ’18 and Manuj Dhariwal SM ’18, who have been longtime creative collaborators in their professional and personal lives. They co-created social and educational board games in India ten years ago when they were newlyweds; these games touched over 300,000 households and were used in 3,000 schools there. The most fulfilling part of Manuj and Shruti’s work was observing how these games encouraged kids to participate in “shared joyful experiences”; this idea still informs their present endeavors and interests.

The pair moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to pursue graduate studies at MIT in 2015. Shruti enrolled as a master’s student in the Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten research group. After finishing his master’s thesis in collaboration with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences departments, Manuj joined Shruti at the Media Lab.

The two are working together as Ph.D. students at the Lifelong Kindergarten organization, which has been a pioneer in creating innovative learning communities and technology for children for over three decades. Lifelong Kindergarten is behind well-known initiatives, including LEGO Mindstorms, Computer Clubhouse, Scratch, and others.

Inspiration for CoCo

The Dhariwals interacted with a group of 8 to 12-year-olds in February 2019 while helping at a youth mindfulness retreat, and they learned that they regularly spent hours playing online multiplayer shooter games. The cause? He surrounded himself with these activities because, as one of the children put it, there was “nothing else to do,” which kept him from feeling lonely in the evenings until his parents got home from work.

The Dhariwals later that day thought about two important questions as a result of this conversation and the setting in which it took place:

1. How can young people engage in various positive online learning activities (beyond playing games) while simultaneously experiencing a genuine real-time connection with their peers?

2. How might we imagine social media platforms for kids and teens consciously based on mindfulness’s key values, such as compassion, connectivity, and non-judgment?

The name and concepts of CoCo were first conceived in this chat, which, by coincidence, contained a lot of terms that began with the letter “co.”

Focusing on knobs rather than switches

The two most common methods for collaboration in digital creative tools are working alone on a project, then sharing it online or working jointly on the same project, such as in a Google Doc.

To create a new co-creative digital world that falls somewhere between the two aforementioned extremes, the Dhariwals presented the design idea of “knobs over switches” with CoCo. CoCo spaces are made to support a variety of ways of “being together” instead of concentrating solely on “working together.” In addition to working independently with others, creators can collaborate on projects, share code, and media in real-time, or work independently.

CoCo is purposefully made to be a “selfless” social media network that rejects the prevailing individual-centric paradigm (of profiles, likes, follows, etc.), which is overly based on the concepts of comparison and gamification. In CoCo, the co-creative spaces where young people interact with peers serve as the essential unit of the system rather than the individual user.

Interest from various countries 

Educators and groups from 68 countries have already expressed their eagerness to adopt CoCo in their classrooms and communities by signing up for the beta release.

In a letter to the editor, a Spanish educator claims, “CoCo opens up a whole new way to collaborate on creative computing projects. Co-creation tools for students are rare and have lots of potential across subject areas and grade levels,” observes different instructor from San Francisco.

Co-inventor of Makey Makey and Lifelong Kindergarten graduate Eric Rosenbaum, SM ’09, Ph.D. ’15 deems CoCo an “incredible new work on collaborative creativity.” 

Shruti Dhariwal responds to the comments by saying, “CoCo has been a labor of love for us, so it has been super encouraging to see all the positive reactions.” The Dhariwals intend to investigate ways of scaling this work further to make CoCo accessible to communities everywhere, given the significant interest in the platform from educational institutions worldwide.

In the era of AI, “Being. Creative. Together.”

CoCo aims to enable young people everywhere to enjoy and experience the power of “Being. Creative. Together.” 

The Dhariwals explain that the qualities of being-ness, creativity, and togetherness are the cornerstone of this work in their blog article on CoCo. They characterize these ideals as being “timeless and timely”; this is a lens they actively employ to decide what to emphasize while coming up with new ideas.

With all the fantastic recent advancements, they write that it’s thrilling to consider new possibilities for kids to create and learn with AI. However, it’s also more important than ever to purposefully create new technologies that emphasize and celebrate our enduring human need for connection.

Read the original article on MIT.

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