Afterschool Matters, a national, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to promoting professionalism, scholarship and consciousness in the field of afterschool education, is seeking material for the Fall 2011 issue. Published by the National Institute on Out-of-School Time with support from the Robert Bowne Foundation, the journal serves those involved in developing and running programs for youth during the out-of-school time hours, in addition to those engaged in research and in shaping youth development policy.

Afterschool Matters seeks scholarly work, from a variety of disciplines, which can be applied to or is based on the afterschool arena. The journal also welcomes submissions that explore practical ideas for working with young people during the out-of-school hours. Articles should connect to current theory and practice in the field by relating to previously published research; a range of academic perspectives will be considered. We also welcome personal or inspirational narratives and essays, review essays, artwork, and photographs.

Deadline is January 17, 2011, for the Fall 2011 issue of Afterschool Matters.

Get more information

Download submission guidelines

39 Clues, Book 10 will be released on August 31, 2010, and kids can converge for a live Q&A with the series’ authors from all 10 books. This highly interactive series includes online and mobile games and is a good model for inspiring kids to enjoy reading. 

Tune in today — August 31, 2010 at 4pm EST for the live Q&A

Download related classroom resources 

M2 Research and partner KidSay recently rleased the first in a semi-annually report series.

Their first publication, Kids and Games: What Boys and Girls are Playing Today, shows a significant increase in kids’ online gaming and social media usage. 90 Percent of tweens are playing games online, with mobile and social media use on the rise, as well. The report includes over 80 gaming charts and outlines key trends and companies. Survey data was collected from over 5,000 kids across the United States.

Highlights include:

– Social Networking: Social Networking is increasingly prevalent in children’s lives. Facebook is now the favorite website among tween (8-11) boys and teen (12-15) girls.

– Key Demographic and “Sweet Spot”: Online games dominate for boys and girls ages 8-11. 91% of tween boys and 93% of tween girls play games online.

See more research highlights here

Read the press release

Cooney Center Prize winner, Yasser Ansari (team leader for Project NOAH), dropped in last week to update the Center on the progress of their mobile app since winning in June.

View the video now!

Learn more about Project NOAH

Learn more about the Cooney Center Prizes and stay tuned for info on our National STEM Video Game Challenge, starting this Fall.

The truly engaging, participatory e-Book technology we’ve been waiting for is finally here.

Inkling for the iPad is a great example of meeting today’s kids where they are. Students can engage in interactive digital textbooks that come alive with rich graphics, video, interactive quizzes, and other features that allow them to highlight, underline, collaborate, and share with their friends.

Although these are texbooks and designed for older kids, this product has great implications for storybooks and other e-Book experiences in our market.

Read related article and see demo in Mobile Content Today

In our last post we described how theories of creativity and learning should be integrated with creative problem solving approaches to address our nation’s creativity crisis. Recent advances in technology are enabling creators of children’s digital media to design more experiences that foster children’s creativity and learning. Although children’s digital media producers are beginning to create products for children that are marketed as creative tools, there is still a lack of mechanisms that have fully captured the type of open-ended, imaginative play that is proven to foster the roots of creativity in children.

Barriers to Digital Creativity Tools

Technological, marketing, and distribution barriers still remain in creating high-quality creative tools for kids on digital platforms. Although huge strides have been made in computer science and human-computer interaction, computers still struggle with complex, unpredictable human behaviors such as improvisation or conversation. Hayes Raffle, Principal Researcher at Nokia Research Labs and designer of open-ended toys ZOOB! and Topobo, says “Most digital tools today are like puzzles rather than like paint brushes – children can discover what designers have hidden inside them, and every child makes the same discoveries. With a paint brush, every child learns how to paint, but each makes something different, and those paintings each mean something personal to the children who made them.”

Not only is there an educational need, but also a hunger for higher-quality creativity tools. In a small study conducted by Latitude Research, 126 children aged 12 and under were asked to suggest concepts for new computer and Web technologies. Thirty one percent of technology ideas proposed by children were a tool or platform for creating something (a Web site, a game, a video to be shared, a physical object, etc.) Participants aspired to be 3D game designers, Web designers, fashion designers, industrial designers, musicians, and traditional artists. The study also found that “kids’ drive to use technology to create was highly under-acknowledged by parents.” Only 7% of participants’ parents chose some form of creation or design as an option as their child’s favorite computer activity while 70% selected gaming. In contrast participants’ artistic design related ideas ranked a close second to gaming ideas.

Kids Creativity Tools in the Marketplace

A growing number of children’s digital media aspires to offer kids creative opportunities. A chart of children’s digital creativity tools is available here with respect to platform and type of activity.

The list includes:

Programming Languages & Game Design:
•    MIT Media Lab’s Scratch
•    Google’s App Inventor for Android (not developed for kids, but based on Scratch)
•    Microsoft’s Kodu Game Lab 
•    Sony’s LittleBigPlanet
•    Electronic Art’s Create
•    LEGO Universe

Arts and Crafts
•    MIT’s Never-Ending Drawing Machine
•    MIT Tangible Media Group’s I/O Brush
•    Alison Lewis’ work in Switch Craft

Literacy & Storytelling
•    The Electric Company video mashup tool
•    Disney Create, powered by Kerpoof
•    Jabberstamp
•    International Children’s Digital Library’s StoryKit app for iPhone
•    Cooney Center Prizes finalist, Launchpad Toys’ Toontastic for the iPad (Fall launch)

A great deal more research must be conducted around creative skills and the activities that support them. These commercial and academic creative tools for kids point to a promising future for these types of applications. However, given the great educational and market gaps, many opportunities still exist for producers to make tools that balance scaffolding with open-ended and imaginative play, as well as promote communication between kid designers and the caring adults in their lives. The Cooney Center’s report on Intergenerational Play & Literacy Learning offers some insights on how children’s media makers might intentionally produce play experiences that support this interaction.

A definition of “creative skills” that is compatible with America’s educational testing culture remains elusive. However, theories on creativity and learning, as well as effective practices from design thinking and systems thinking, must be part of the dialogue if we are raise our national CQ. By tapping into children’s passion for digital media with technology supported creative tools, we’ll offer them more opportunities to exercise their creative and design skills today so that they’ll be prepared to devise innovative solutions for the complex challenges of tomorrow.

Other blogs in this series: 

Transforming Children’s Learning to Address America’s Creativity Crisis

Learning Across Silos: An Integrated Approach to the Creativity Crisis 

Ann My Thai is the Assistant Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. She is also the lead author of the Center’s report on digital games and children’s health and learning, Game Changer. Andy Russell is an educational media designer with a special interest in developing toys and tools that empower kids to express themselves creatively through play. Andy is a Co-Founder of Launchpad Toys and has worked for companies like Hasbro and Sony PlayStation to design playful learning experiences for kids.

Public Media’s Impact on Young Readers

Time for a Fresh Look

Reprinted from EdWeek with permission from Susan B. Neuman

For the average middle-class American, it might be hard to comprehend just how
devastating the effects of poverty are on children’s early literacy development. But the social and educational deficits poor children must overcome to learn to read are all too clear from numerous research studies.

Download the full article

There is something wonderfully simple about my 5-month-old daughter’s inexperience in our digital universe.

I was three years old when the nation watched a woman in runner’s uniform hurl a hammer at “Big Brother” during Super Bowl XVIII. The world was invited to watch in awe and wonder how new technologies might empower us and where they could lead us next. At the time, my family had a Hershey computer running MS-DOS that my father built from a do-it-yourself kit a few years prior. We also had a pong set, (built once again by my father, several years before the computer).  I can’t say that I remember watching that Apple Super Bowl commercial, but I do remember pondering where technology could take me.  Back then, we were wishing for flying cars (the next year, a Delorean would send me Back to the Future and I’d be waiting for time travel as well). We didn’t foresee that with the advent of the internet, people wouldn’t have to leave their houses, rendering flying cars unnecessary.

When I was in early high school, I got my first email address through the local library. It came with dialup text-only Internet service. I visited Websites about my favorite television show (Friends) and downloaded MIDI files of my favorite songs. By the time I was a senior, however, everyone that I knew had a web browser and almost everyone had an AOL Instant Messenger screen name. There was one boy in my class who had a girlfriend that he met over the Internet, we thought of that as the ultimate sign of geekdom. Who but a geek would ever meet someone over the Internet?

My freshman year at MIT, many students had their own computers, but many used the “Athena” computer workstations instead. It was the first time that any of us had experienced the speed of a T1 Internet connection and everyone took quickly to the lightening fast speeds with which we could download mp3s from one another. A local student at Northeastern wrote a file sharing program called Napster and everyone hopped on board. Less than 3 years later, college students began getting fines for downloading songs, Napster was shut down, and everyone became a little more cautious.

At my first job, I sat next to a recent Harvard alumna who was invited to something called Facebook, which was just like Friendster, MySpace, and Orkut, but it was only for Harvard alumni. Our desks were outfitted with brightly colored iMacs; hers was red, mine blue.

I am not quite in Generation X and not quite in Generation Y. You can call us “Generation X plus Y over 2” but I’d like to think of us (those turning thirty this year) as the tech generation. We grew up alongside the personal computer. We were born with the command prompt and became more dexterous the same time as the mouse emerged. We were young when cell phones started out built for our cars and were in high school and college as they made their way into our pockets.

It’s common nowadays to read about the youngest generation, sometimes called Generation Z, I, or the Internet Generation, but often referred to as “Digital Natives.” My daughter may be considered part of this generation or perhaps the next (or Z plus Alpha over 2?). But, if she is a digital native, then I must be a first generation digital resident.

It is my generation that is now educating these “Digital Natives.” Just as first generation Americans wish to instill a sense of connection to the country of origin, we wish for our children, not to take technology for granted, but rather appreciate its evolution. This has already become a challenge amongst the current teen population. Many colleges and universities are dropping classes that taught about microchips and bare-bones programming due to lack of enrollment.

In a previous Cooney Center Blog, Ann My Thai discussed the “creativity crisis.” Creativity scores amongst America’s youth are on the decline. Students don’t want to start from scratch, use their imaginations, and build. They want to use existing tools and enhance. If we want for our children to be truly innovative, we need to figure out how to connect them to their technological origins and become pioneers of the digital revolution. We need to raise children that will create the Microsoft or Apple of the 21^st century. We need another hammer to hurl at Big Brother.

Gabrielle A. Cayton-Hodges is the 2009-2010 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. She has spent ten years researching young children’s learning and cognitive development in and out of the classroom.

Gaming for Behavior Change is a nice, brief publication addressing change making gaming.

Design shop Method, that is doing some interesting things in this area, offers this description:

“An estimated 3 billion hours are currently spent on gaming every week. By age 21, the average American will have spent more than 10,000 hours playing video games – the equivalent to 5 years of work at a full time job! The total amount of time that World of Warcraft has been played is 5.93 million years. Game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal makes the case in her 2010 TED talk that games inspire people the way real life does not, raising the question: what is it about games that enables this extraordinary degree of engagement?

Several studies have sought to unlock the psychological attraction of game play, but what is abundantly clear is that the whole gaming industry has been growing rapidly. Casual gaming company Zynga recently surpassed 100 million unique monthly visitors with the release of their viral hits Mafia Wars and Farmville, giving them an estimated valuation rumored to be $4 billion.”

Read a similar publication that addresses change agents through the mobile environment: Place, Space, and the Mobile Interface.

Check out the Game Industry Black Book Q3 Q4 2010. Excellent opportunities and resources on development, career, distribution, platforms, marketing, and other business opportunities.