On Presidents Day weekend, children at the SMUD Museum of Science and Curiosity, or MOSAC, in Sacramento played Wreathies, a game created by graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Communication’s UC Davis Media Lab. The game is part of a scientific study to test whether kids between 8 and 12 years old prefer to have choices in their learning.

The booming growth of AI chatbots is similar to the trajectory of how social media radically changed our everyday lives, except with supercharged adoption rates and expectations. Some key lessons we are still learning from social media’s rise offer insight on how to avoid the same mistakes with AI.

The 2025 Comm Horizons conference at UC Davis, hosted by the Department of Communication from May 16-18 2025, covered some of the most pressing issues about media and society. The conference showcased visiting luminaries in the field with the deep and diverse expertise of faculty in the College of Letters and Science.

Among the 27 faculty members who won this year’s award, eight were from the College of Letters and Sciences.

A UC Davis research team in the Department of Communication is studying how children learn in a virtual reality environment. They recently opened this research to public participation at the Museum of Science and Curiosity, or MOSAC, in Sacramento, where undergraduate research assistants played a key role in making this research possible.