In this course, I am going to tell you my story of how children’s minds develop in the modern world, and how their social environment influences this development. In this story, I will not be following the existing handbooks on children’s cognitive development. Rather, my aim is to illuminate and illustrate some ideas, which in my view are central for understanding this development.

I will start this course with discussing the issue of how some ideas of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky can help us understand recent discoveries of infants’ extraordinary cognitive abilities.

I will continue with presenting some models on how our ability to learn new things and develop our minds works.

I will then illustrate these models by presenting and discussing research on the development of perception, thinking and executive function.

I will finish this course by presenting and discussing extended psychological-pedagogical programs aimed to enhance independence and creativity of children’s judgment and behavior in the classroom through facilitating their ability to resist the urge of imitating confusing social signals.

The course includes four sections, eight lectures supplied with relevant readings, and a quiz. Lectures contain author’s text, author’s videos, a video with a child performing on an executive control task, graphs and animated pictures.

I built this course for students in social sciences, specialists in education, child care, medicine, writers for children and all those who want to learn more about topics on children’s cognitive development that they will not be able find in most traditional handbooks.