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When we mentor student researchers, we do not usually start with "what's your research question?" We start before that. For a recent conference held by the Computational Social Science group at UC Davis, I asked the students to start with a topic or issue about artificial intelligence that genuinely interested them. They came back with broad topics: teenagers, menopause; which, if nothing else, gave us range. From there, we worked backward in two teams. What was the actual pr

What happens when preschoolers get to decide what they want to play? That question became the basis of an eight-week research partnership between our team at UC Davis and Lingokids, an educational app for young children. Unlike some of our other projects, we did not design the app ourselves. Instead, Lingokids already had something particularly useful for answering our question: two versions of the same app that gave children very different levels of control. In one version,