schoolwork. This finding refocused research attention to the link between activities that children engaged in outside of formal schooling and their performance in the classroom. The interplay between informal and formal educational activities continues to concern LCHC researchers today. Research activities in the United States LCHC has been noted for conducting comparative developmental studies in a number of domains of social practice in the United States, including: comparative studies of language and cognitive development among children of different ethnicities and social classes or with differing forms of apparent learning disability; building model activity systems to promote learning and development, such as Playworlds and the Fifth Dimension; and studies of development in work settings. Current active topics of research at LCHC include: adult-child fantasy play worlds as media for inter-generational development; intervention research using methods of design research, formative experiments, and studies of the micro-genesis of developmental change mediated by new technologies. Research philosophy The LCHC's physical location on the UCSD campus is rarely the site of data collection because of LCHC's methodological imperative: to observe cognition and other psychological phenomena in everyday activities, then to use the structure of that activity as a template for creating experiments, conceived of as model activity systems. LCHC research programs strive to meet the practical need for developing democratic collaborations. On the one hand, this need requires local community members to participate in the activities of the laboratory, creating partnerships between academics and non-academics referred to as UCLinks. On the other hand, within the academic community, democratic collaboration requires faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students share responsibility for the implementation of research, creating a multi-generational system of joint activities. Internationalism in research efforts has been a hallmark of the LCHC since its inception. Of special note in this regard is the VelHam Project, which was an ambitious attempt to link Soviet and U.S. educationalists and children engaged in common after-school activities through satellite feeds during the 1980s, and XMCA, a network of scholars seeking to develop the general set of ideas which underpin LCHC's reason for being. Technologies of research The LCHC has a tradition of using modern communication and computer technologies in its research work. This tradition stemmed from a focus on the cultural tools (mediational means) that are central to all culturally organized human activity, and from efforts to extend the scholarly community that pursued issues of mutual concern to members of the