Where Child's Play is a Science

There’s a science lab at Rollins College where instead of Bunsen burners and microscopes researchers use crayons, papier mache and Play-Doh.

It’s a place where psychology students sit in pint-size furniture and study child development in the most hands-on way — because their lab is also a working preschool.

Hume House Child Development and Student Research Center was set up 50 years ago so Rollins students could learn about child development and early childhood education.

“What they’re reading about in their textbook is really coming to life through their lab experience,” said Alice Davidson, a psychology professor and executive director of the facility.

The preschool, located on Rollins’ Winter Park campus, serves up to 36 children at a time and always has a waitlist.

Part of Hume’s mission is to showcase effective ways to teach young children. The Rollins school offers training to teachers from other preschools, inviting them to observe Hume classes. And the college may soon reach even more early childhood teachers through a proposed partnership with the Early Learning Coalition of Orange County, which administers public funding to 641 preschools.

“It’s a tremendous resource that we have in our community,” said Scott Fritz, CEO of the Coalition, who recently toured Hume. “When I was there, I saw engaged children. I saw teachers that were meeting children where they were and helping them develop and flourish.”

Inside, the facility looks in many ways like a typical preschool, but each of its three classrooms are fitted with one-way mirrors. On the other side, college students and professors observe the children, ages 2 to 5, and their teachers.

Hume’s appeal to parents includes college-educated teachers — far from common in Florida preschools — and a creative curriculum that builds lessons around the young students’ interests. Parents must consent to have their children take part in the research, but many are Rollins employees and few object.

“I trust my colleagues implicitly that they are going to do what’s best for everybody involved and that they are not going to be like lab rats,” said MacKenzie Moon Ryan, an art history professor whose 3-year-old daughter, Ophelia, attends the preschool.

View from one of the observation rooms at the Hume House Child Development & Research Center, a preschool housed inside Rollins College's phycology department, on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)

All the children at Hume are paired with a Rollins student — their “big friend,” who is enrolled in a psychology class and visits once a week. The Rollins student studies the child’s development over the course of a semester recording, for example, how many words they say in a set period of time and tracking progress.

“It’s a very challenging course because we have to be interacting with them, playing with them, building a relationship with our target child while also taking a lot of notes on them,” said Ruth Boucher, a junior majoring in psychology.

Parents are kept up to date on the research through newsletters.

“We showcase different students who are doing research projects so that the parents really have an understanding of what’s going on,” Davidson said.

One newsletter last year, for example, informed parents that a psychology major interested in a career in art therapy was at Hume to study artistic expression and appreciation in early childhood. The newsletter featured a photo of the Rollins student painting a primary color wheel for the children.

The school’s curriculum is based on the Reggio Emilia approach developed in Italy. There are no set lesson plans. Instead, teachers tap into the children’s interests and use those to build educational activities.

In a recent class, the children were interested in the Disney movie Frozen, so their teacher had them build a castle out of a cardboard refrigerator box.

“They painted it all day. When it was dry, they set it in the classroom,” said Diane Doyle, director of Hume. “And then, of course, they started reading stories, fairy tales, nursery rhymes or things like that.”

The fairy tales led to them building a papier mache Rapunzel with orange yarn for hair.

“Think about all that they had to learn to create that,” Doyle said.

“They had to figure out, where’s the body, where’s the legs? How do we get it to stick to the paper? How long is the hair going to be?” she said. “There’s math, there’s science, there’s problem solving, fine motor skills, gross motor skills, socio-emotional stuff like, ‘maybe my idea doesn’t win out’. Or, ‘I have to wait my turn to hear everyone’s ideas about what color we should make Rapunzel’s dress’.”

All those skills will help children excel when they get to kindergarten, she said.

The cardboard castle continued to prompt lessons, as children brought toy dragons to live inside it, then discussed taking pets to a veterinarian and then pivoted to dinosaurs. That classroom is now filled with dinosaur books, plastic dinosaurs and habitats for those creatures made out of arts and crafts supplies.

Left to Right, James, assistant teacher Angele O'Callahan and Louis at the Hume House Child Development & Research Center, a preschool housed inside Rollins College's phycology department, on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)

Fritz, with the Early Learning Coalition, said watching how Hume’s preschool teachers create and supervise those lessons would be useful to others, particularly those without a college education.

Many of the region’s preschools operate on shoe-string budgets, serving largely low-income families who cannot afford the tuition hikes that would cover higher-skilled teachers or extra training.

Hume teachers’ pay aligns more with public school teachers, and they get insurance and other benefits, too.

Fritz hopes a partnership with Hume could mean college-level training for preschool teachers at no cost to them.

“This would be good for master teachers but also for teachers that are new to the profession that maybe don’t have a formal education,” Fritz said. “This will be a great way to build their toolbox.”

Home visits before a child starts at Hume are a key part of the lab school’s approach.

“The children can show them their bedroom, their favorite stuff, their pets,” Davidson said. “And that is a connection point so that when they come to school, then it’s like, ‘Hey, you’ve been to my house’.”

During those visits, teachers take pictures of the children with their families.

“If a child’s missing mom and needs to just take a few minutes to kind of calm down, they might take the picture of their family and go sit in the cozy corner,” Davidson said. “And they can kind of self-regulate till they’re ready to come back and join the rest of the group.”

The home visits also give teachers better insight into children’s development as young kids often act differently where they feel more comfortable.

Moon Ryan, the professor, said her child is a “motor mouth” at home. But when she got to Hume, she barely spoke.

“She was taking it all in. She was observing. She was really shy,” Moon Ryan said.

Without the home visit, her teacher might have suspected the child had a speech or social delay. But that visit allowed for a more complete picture of a 3-year-old who just needed time to get comfortable in a new environment.

Nico and Gianna paint at Hume House Child Development & Research Center, a preschool housed inside Rollins College's phycology department, on Wednesday, March 4, 2026. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/ Orlando Sentinel)

In most preschools, children are separated by age. But classes at Hume mix children ages two to five, encouraging them to learn from one another.

“The two-year-olds have more mature models. So they get to observe more sophisticated play,” Davidson said. “And the older children, they’re nurturing the younger ones. So it gives them good leadership skills.”

Shannen Victor, a Rollins junior who did research at Hume her sophomore year, plans to go to law school after graduation, but said her time at the preschool was a key college experience.

She still keeps in touch with the family whose child she observed, sending the little girl a happy-birthday message recently, and now volunteers at Hume.

“I am interested in service,” she said. “I see a lot of engagement with the children and how I’m able to help enrich their learning but also give back to the community as well.”