Today, E-Line Media and the Institute of Play are launching Gamestar Mechanic, a game-based learning platform that teaches the principles of game design as a form of 21st Century skill building in a highly engaging and creative environment.

Gamestar Mechanic was created through a unique public private partnership that includes leading foundations, non-profits, academia and the game industry. Development of the game was initially funded through a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to the Institute of Play. The game is published by E-Line Media, one of the Cooney Center’s esteemed partners.

The Gamestar Mechanic platform taps into the natural passion of youth for playing and making games. The title helps them develop the technological, artistic, cognitive, social, and linguistic skills that they will need to thrive in the 21st Century, including: Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, Creativity, Collaboration and Digital Media Literacy. The game also provides a powerful motivation for learning critical STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) skills.

Gamestar Mechanic features three, fully integrated components: Quests, with exciting adventure games that provide critical scaffolding for the core principles of game design; a Player Workshop, featuring easy-to-use drag-and-drop game creation tools; and Game Alley, a community where players can publish their games, discover, play and review the games of their peers and enter great game design competitions.

In addition to regular monthly game design competitions, many players in the Gamestar Mechanic community will also be eligible to enter two national game design competitions: the prestigious Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, which recently added video games as a new design category, and the National STEM Video Game Challenge recently announced by President Obama at the White House.

Congratulations to the teams at E-Line and Institute of Play!

Gamestar Mechanic Press Release

Download Gamestar Educator Overview

 

iPhone Game Makes Math Physical — Tilt gameplay gives learners an intuitive sense of fractions

Motion Math, the pioneer of movement based learning games, today announces the launch of their fractions game which will help students master mathematics. Fractions are a notoriously difficult area of math for many learners. One half, 1/2, .5, and 50 percent all refer to the same amount, but to many students learning fractions, theyʼre only equally bewildering. Research has shown both that fractions are crucial for more advanced math content, and that the ability to quickly estimate values on the number line correlates with later math achievement. Motion Math offers an innovative solution for this pervasive problem: itʼs an iPhone game, available this week on the Apple App Store. The Motion Math app makes estimating fractions an engaging, physical experience.

Stay tuned for an upcoming Cooney Center blog post by creators, Jacob Klein and Gabriel Adauto

Download Motion Math app 

Download full press release

At last year’s Leadership Forum, Participant Media screened an early trailer for Waiting for Superman, which opens tomorrow. Here is some commentary on the film from Diana Rhoten, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Startl:

I had the chance to attend the CUSP Conference in Chicago these last couple of days. I am not much of a conference go-er as I typically hate the contrived socializing and obsequious insider-ism that often go along with overpriced conference fees and underwhelming hotel rooms.

But, CUSP was different, and as far as conferences go, it was a pretty great experience. I actually wanted to meet the people who were there and my applause for all of the talks was authentic.

Highlights of the conference for me included: Liz Gerber’s talk on Design for America, a new non-profit that gives college student real world opportunities to apply their talent to design solutions for local problems and with social impact; Olivia B’s presentation on how she uses photography to capture the world and design nostalgia for all of us (note: she’s sixteen, sassy, and super, super talented); and, Michelle Kauffmann’s talk on rethinking home design using principles of smart design and eco design, conservation and collaboration, modernism and prefab(rication).

The theme of the conference was “design for everything,” and I gave a talk on Design for Learning. It was a new talk for me, and one I didn’t really get my head around until the morning of. So, I decided to eat my own dog food … the whole test fast, fail fast approach.

The talk came off okay for an alpha version. And, so I thought I‘d post the first half of the talk here as Waiting for Superman opens in theaters today. I urge everyone to see the movie as soon as it comes your way and to think about what you can do to change the future of learning.

How many of you have heard about the movie Waiting for Superman, which opens in LA and NY this Friday? It’s gotten quite a bit of publicity pre-release, especially for an education documentary.

If you don’t know the story, let me just give you the quick overview. Don’t worry, I won’t blow the end for you. No need for a spoiler alert.

The movie follows five children and their parents as they compete in the lottery process for one of very few slots in their local charter schools.

Through the experience of these five families, the movie tells the story of how our current education system is failing to provide enough quality education for those who demand it.

Alongside the stories of these five protagonists, the film also provides a variety of evidence and opinion that suggests the adults in the system – particularly, the teachers unions – are responsible for letting the public-school system devolve to the state of crisis it’s in today.

And, while the movie is meant to be more provocative about the nature of this crisis than prescriptive about the possible solutions, the movie certainly suggests that things like charter schools and teacher merit pay are the best ways out of this calamity.

It’s very hard to argue with the message of Waiting for Superman: Our education system is failing our kids and their families left and right.

It’s equally hard to argue with the intent of the film: Our system is in a crisis of epic proportions, we are running out of time, and we need help – everyone’s help.

But, where I will argue, or at least quibble, with the movie is with the takeaways: The movie is an incredibly poignant depiction of the crisis, but in my humble opinion is unimaginative and rather derivative in terms of the “five simple solutions” it lays out in the end.

Better accountability, world-class standards, higher expectations, better teacher pay … We’ve tried every single one of these things, many times, in multiple places.

They are not working. They are not enough.

Personally, I don’t believe the solutions to today’s education crisis are going to come in the form of traditional policies alone.

I believe we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning.

This is a massive, radical design challenge.

I have been in this whole education business since about oh, 1972. What’s that, just less than 40 years now?

I started my career at the TC Passios elementary school in Lunenburg MA as a first grader. I managed to work my way up to middle school, through high school, and ultimately on to and out of college.

I was one of the lucky ones. I was a pretty good student. But, more than anything I knew how to work the system.

Eventually my student career evolved into a professional career in education. First, as an English teacher, then as a policy maker, a graduate student, a researcher and a consultant.

In each of these jobs, I continued to work the system just as I had as a student, but I never figured out how to “fix” system.

I guess, in truth, I started to resemble one of those adults in Waiting for Superman, more responsible for perpetuating the failures of the system than generating any novel successes.

After a while of feeling ineffectual and growing cynical, I left the field of education to design and facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between scientists. I love a challenge (read: I am a masochist).

Following this brief hiatus, I came back to education a couple of years ago. For the first time (at least in my lifetime), I believed that the circumstances of crisis and the conditions of possibility had evolved to a point where supply and demand could actually align to enable – if not insist on – real change.

Today, I want to tell you a little about the work my colleagues and I are doing to accelerate the alignment of these forces and re-design of the face and the future of learning. I’m going to start by laying out a few assumptions and a few aspirations that guide the work what we do.

So, here we go, three assumptions.

Assumption 1: The future of education is about learning not schooling.
If we continue to limit our thinking about education to 28 students,1 teacher,1500 square feet between the hours of 8 to 3, we are condemning today’s fourth graders to exactly the same educational experience that I got in 1976, that my father got in 1946, and that his father got in 1916.

And, as long as we constrain ourselves to thinking about education in terms of these traditional parameters of schooling and not frame the conversation about learning as something that happens anywhere, anytime, by default we limit our ability to imagine alternatives that could actually get us out of the crisis we’re in today.

So, what if instead of trying to tinker with the existing school structure using old policy maneuvers, we actually tried to retool education with new insights and approaches so that, at least in theory, the experience of learning today reflected the life and times of 2010 rather than 1976 or 1946 or worse 1916.

Everything else in our kids’ lives has evolved. Don’t we owe it to them to try to make their education not only rigorous for them but relevant to them?

You know where I’m going with this, right. I am so transparent. But, yes, technology.

Assumption 2: Technology is not an end in itself but a means to an end, and that end is better learning.
The idea that technology has an important role to play in education is not new. In fact, we’ve toyed with ideas of “ed tech” for the last 30 years. About half the time we’ve played around with teacher merit pay.

However, to date most of technology applications in the education sector have been about increasing the efficiency of institutional schooling rather than improving the efficacy of individual learning. But, what if we designed new technologies for the learner rather than the school administrator?

Today, given the lower cost and greater ubiquity of digital media and personal devices, the opportunity to create new tech-enabled experiences that improve learning is greater than ever.

And, so is the responsibility. When 30% of high school students drop out in America (as high as 50% in some urban centers) but 93% of them are online, the need to reach these kids wherever they are, whenever they need it, with whatever tools they use is more important than ever.

Assumption 3: The power of technology to advance learning depends on context of use.
We are not technological determinists. We don’t believe in simply throwing technology over the fence and seeing what happens. We know from experience that technology is never the silver bullet (though it can sometimes be the bullet).

Rather, we believe in order for new technologies to really effect the positive (rather than the negative) change in learning we think they can, we need to think about how users translate the affordances that have been designed into the products into the learning outcomes we want from the products.

For us, those outcomes still depend on the social practices and the contextual experiences of learning.

Our vision of technologically enabled learning is not one of the lone child sitting at her desktop (or laptop) passively consuming PDFs or browsing Web pages. We believe the potential of technology for learning is much greater. We believe its power resides in its ability to deliver active and interactive experiences where a learner participates in the very construction of knowledge by crafting and curating, mixing and re-mixing information with digital tools, a process which can be and should be greatly augmented by online and offline social interactions between friends, in a community of peers, or an extended network of people (both professional and amateur) who share her interests.

Technology is just a tool. Its effects ultimately depend on the people who use them, how and where. Thus, technology does not negate the role of people or place in learning, but it does change their definitions and their dynamics. And, so just as we design new technologies for learning, we must also consider the contexts for learning that will facilitate their best use … whether that is at school, at home, at the library, on the job, or a place we have not yet imagined.

Now, our three aspirations.

Aspiration 1: We want to be disruptive in our work.
Our goal is to “shock the system” by bringing to light concrete, real life, radical examples of what the future of learning could really look like. Both in terms of the technological tools and the social contexts.

If we are doing business as usual, we will have failed.

Aspiration 2: We see our work as taking place on the edges.
We believe the edge is place in the system where the risk of failure and the opportunity for success are most allowable, and we want to be the people who to take the risk to demonstrate the opportunity.

We’re not Pollyannaish about the challenges of working on the edge. We know much of what we try will fail; that’s what innovation is about. We also know that it will take time for the work we support to travel from the early adopters to the mainstream, but we don’t see an alternative.

Better to demonstrate what could be than to wait for what might be.

Aspiration 3: We want to work with thinkers and doers, makers and movers beyond the “usual suspects.”
Our success depends on our ability to recruit talented folks who haven’t necessarily considered themselves stakeholders in the system before and to engaging their expertise, their insights, and their resources to solve this problem.

That’s not to say, we don’t value the work and the commitment of those who have been fighting the long battle. We do, tremendously. But we also believe that sometime an “outsider’s” perspective can help us see what we don’t see. Wasn’t it Henry Miller who said something like ‘One’s destination is a new way of looking at things.’

Without a new way of looking at things, a charter school is just a school without bureaucracy. To me, that is still a solution that serves the adults better, but not necessarily the students.

I’d like now to just tell you a little bit about how we are trying to execute on these assumptions and aspirations through the work of Startl.

Startl wants to do for the emerging field of learning innovations exactly what Redford did for the independent film community in the 1980s.

The entire enterprise of Sundance—the workshops, the film festival, and the television channel—reshaped the independent film landscape largely because it anticipated the future and was willing to take a measured risk. We are trying to do the same.

Through its institute, Sundance provided venues for identifying and nurturing new talent. Startl is recruiting and supporting amazing new talent through its Boost and Accelerator programs.

Through its film festival, it became the tastemaker for and broker of cutting-edge products. Startl is creating a variety of events to showcase the products and companies coming through Startl and to introduce these new entrepreneurs and innovators to investors.

And, through its channel, Sundance established new distribution pathways, initially to reach underserved markets and ultimately to take the independent film sector from the fringe to the mainstream. This will be an emphasis of Startl’s work going forward, trying to create new testing, marketing, and distribution pathways to get these new products into the hands of learners.

As Geoff Canada has said: “If you want to change public education, you have to do something that feels like a threat to the status quo.  … There is no Superman coming … All they have is us.”

We agree. And, so at Startl, we are not waiting for Superman to save our schools.

Instead, through our programs, events, and channels we are empowering Superheroes to re-design the face and the future of learning.

Send us your talented, your eager. Your creative minds yearning to make change.

 

Diana Rhoten, PhD, is Co-Founder & Managing Director of Startl, an organization dedicated to accelerating innovations for learning. Diana has been designing and evaluating educational policies and programs, organizations and technologies since she began her career as an educational analyst in Massachusetts. Over the last decade, She has been faculty at the Stanford School of Education, co-director of a nonprofit research institute dedicated to interdisciplinary collaboration, and consultant to a host of large educational institutions seeking to innovate. She has also been the founder of three different programs focused on the future of learning at both the Social Science Research Council and the National Science Foundation. Diana has published in numerous journals and most recently co-edited a volume on the future of higher education called Knowledge Matters. She earned a Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Educational Policy and an M.A. in Sociology from Stanford University, as well as an M.Ed. from Harvard University and an A.B. from Brown University.

I was asked by the Cooney Center to share my thoughts about winning this year’s Prize for Breakthroughs in Literacy Learning: Innovate with The Electric Company. When I found out we won, I immediately called my wife and kids to let them know. I have four kids and the three oldest — Hannah (7), Isaac (5) and Josh (3) — are huge, I mean really huge, Electric Company fans. My youngest, Gabriella (1), is too young for TV, but I’m sure she’ll be an Electric Company groupie too. So, when I first told them I won, it was kind of like…I was a rock star!

 

But my rock star status was short-lived. My kids quickly realized that there were limits to my newfound fame.

Hannah:            “Are you going to meet Jessica?”

Isaac:                “And Hector.”

Josh:                 “And Manny Spamboni.”

Me:                   “Well…I don’t think I’ll have a chance to meet the cast. But I think I’ll meet the producers of the show.”

Hannah:             “The producer!  Who wants to meet a producer?”

Isaac:                “What’s a producer?”

Me:                   “The person who makes the show.”

Josh:                 “You mean Manny Spamboni.”

Isaac:                “No, not Manny Spamboni. He’s a Prankster, not a producer.”

Hannah:             “You won the prize. They should let you meet Jessica.”

Me:                    “I’ll see what I can do.”

After winning the award, I knew my mission was to meet Jessica, because like most dads, I don’t like to disappoint. With Jessica in my sights, I decided to start out by meeting a bunch of extremely talented individuals, including The Electric Company‘s Executive Producer, Karen Fowler, and Supervising Producer for Broadband, Erica Branch-Ridley. One meeting led to another and before I knew it we were brainstorming different ideas about how to build interactive stories and innovative games that would promote The Electric Company‘s educational curriculum.  During my Sesame Workshop meetings, I consistently met people who were dynamic, intelligent, and most of all, super nice. I must admit, the cynical New Yorker in me, more Oscar than Elmo, wondered how so many smart people could be so nice. Were they fabricated in some secret Sesame Workshop lab?  Were they cloned pursuant to a clandestine Department of Education grant? No. It turns out they were all real people.

After my first few meetings, I was excited to tell my kids about how great it was to work with the people who created their favorite television show. My daughter, part 7 year-old, part 17 year-old, impatiently asked, “Well, have you met Jessica yet?” Slightly deflated, I admitted that I had yet to meet the young star of the show. My company and I had won the first ever Cooney Center literacy prize and we were about to be awarded with our first contract to work for Sesame Workshop, but my status as a rock star dad was quickly fading.

I had another meeting scheduled with the creative team at The Electric Company. Karen Fowler told me that Jessica was in the building. An hour passed brainstorming different transmedia ideas, curricular goals like decoding and virtual world play patterns, but Jessica slipped out of the building before I had the chance to meet her. Maybe she sensed my desperation, or worse, that I was a celebrity stalker. It was time to confess to Karen that the real reason I was so aggressive in pushing my idea for a virtual world literacy curriculum was so that I could meet Jessica to stay in good standing with my kids.

We had one last meeting to discuss our ideas, and not more than15 minutes into it, guess who walked through the door. It was none other than Priscilla Diaz aka Jessica. My introduction to Priscilla was short, but memorable. Priscilla was just as engaging and bright as the character she plays on TV. I let her know that my kids were big fans of hers. We shook hands and I told her I may never wash that hand again. Mission accomplished!

I went home that day and immediately told my daughter that I met Jessica. She smiled for a few seconds, satisfied just long enough to want more, and said “well, how come you didn’t meet Manny Spamboni?”

* * *

In fairness to my children, as well as The Electric Company, I’m not sure everything happened exactly the way I suggested. But you get the basic idea. Dad accomplishes something he thinks is cool and kids think something else is cool. It’s the story of any parent’s life.

In winning the Cooney Center Prize for Breakthroughs in Literacy Learning, my company, Dreamkind, and I were able to accomplish our real mission. We are currently working with The Electric Company to build an awesome game that is based on hysterically funny characters. The game promotes The Electric Company‘s connected text curriculum and encourages kids to “follow-through” when reading. The game should go live on PBS Kids’ website in January 2011. We are very excited to have this opportunity and hope to continue to grow our relationship with Sesame Workshop. And secretly, I hope this game will finally give me a chance to meet Manny Spamboni.

 

Jay Schiffman is the founder of Dreamkind, an entertainment studio that develops video games and digital media for kids and their families. In collaboration with the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), Dreamkind has recently released its latest iPhone/iPad app, Sproutster. This educational video game is free and all the proceeds from advertising go to the WFP to feed malnourished children. So please download it and play, because the more you play, the more rice Dreamkind can donate. To learn more, go to www.dreamkind.com.

You can now peak into the inaugural Cooney Center Prizes Quick Pitches that were held at the E3 Expo in June!

Here are the finalists from our Breakthroughs in Mobile Learning prize:

• Motion Math
• Toontastic
• Mobile Technology for Sustainable Literacy

Watch the winning pitch given by team Project NOAH

View all the quick pitches

See the awards ceremony, presented by White House CTO, Aneesh Chopra

Read information on our newest competition, the National STEM Video Game Challenge!

 

Last Wednesday, September 15^th, Gary Goldberger presented his most recent projects to a packed audience at Teachers College, Columbia University. Gary is President and Co-Founder of FableVision – a transmedia “social change agency” dedicated to helping all learners reach their full potential.  Women in Children’s Media sponsored the talk, and the audience included both students and professionals in the children’s television and digital industries.

 

Gary has an enthusiasm for art and creativity not often seen in the educational media world.  He presented several of his favorite FableVision projects.

• Animation-Ish is billed as the “world’s easiest animation software.” Users are led through three optional levels of increasing animation skill: Wiggledoodle-ish, FlipBook-ish, and Advanced-ish. The software allows users as young as age 5 to create their own animations.
• Zebrafish is a series of animated Webisodes they created for the Children’s Hospital Trust that inspires tweens to help and care about sick kids. The story follows a group of kids who form a band to raise money for a sick friend. The story was recently made into a graphic novel, and a real-world “battle of the bands” is about to take place motivated by the series.
• Dr. Peggy Healy Stearn’s Fab@School Designer is a very recent venture (not yet available) that uses digital fabrication, an emerging technology. The product provides a powerful and compelling context for integrating STEM education into the existing classroom curricula by allowing students to fabricate their own inventions with specialty printers. Gary was very proud to show the crowd a video of how he tested the product at home with his son to create a real-life duplication of a gear made out of cake frosting.
• The Lure of the Labyrinth is a multi-player on-line video game developed in conjunction with Maryland Public Television and MIT Education Arcade to improve literacy and math scores for middle school students. The game encourages collaborative play, but also allows kids to work individually to achieve their goals.

Following the presentation, there was an interesting conversation with the audience about transmedia storytelling.  The term, coined by Henry Jenkins at MIT, is about the intentional use of connecting different forms of media. (For example, Zebrafish started with Webisodes, but later became a graphic novel and an on-line “battle of the bands” competition.) Gary stressed that it’s important to consider the audience and different places the audience can access the message being created. “It’s not just a branding exercise, but taking advantage of inherent capabilities of the medium,” he said.  He also emphasized the idea that different partners need to be involved to accomplish this, as no one company can do everything.

It was a great evening, exploring some exciting projects that combine creativity and learning with technology.  Participants walked away with a better understanding of FableVision’s inspirational philosophy and a desire to create transmedia projects of their own

 

Melissa Morgenlander is a kids’ media researcher specializing in cognitive development and early childhood math understanding. She received her Ph.D from Teachers College, Columbia University, where her doctoral dissertation was about adult-child co-viewing of Sesame Street. Read more about Melissa at her blog, the Co-Viewing Connection.

 

Further Exploration:

Read more about children’s creativity tools in our recent blog post by Ann My Thai and Andy Russell: Tech Supported Tools to Foster Kids’ Creativity

 

 

Applications for our November 2010 Mobile Design Boostare closing this Friday – September 24.
We will select up to 15 3-4 person entrepreneurial teams to participate in the Boost. Developed in conjunction with IDEO, the Mobile Design Boost is a four day building, hacking, business and human centered design immersion taking place in San Francisco, November 11-14, 2010. There is no cost for the program itself, applicants just need to cover their travel and lodging costs. The application deadline is September 24 with the selected teams being notified by October 15.

Participants of prior Design Boosts have used the opportunity to fine tune products and approaches to great success. Following Startl’s first mobile learning Design Boost in March 2010, two participating companies Launchpad Toys and Project NOAH (Networked Organisms and Habitats) – were named finalists in the Breakthroughs in Mobile Learning category for the Cooney Center Prizes for Innovation in Children’s Learning.

Apply now and increase your chances in coming to the Startl Design Boost.

On September 7, the Department and the National Education Association (NEA) Foundation launched a new program, along with the US Department of Education, for teachers to identify and solve education’s most pressing classroom challenges. “Challenge to Innovate” (C2i) enlists teachers to think creatively and implement innovative classroom ideas. C2i also recognizes the urgency of improvement by providing a new model that moves rapidly from idea conception to implementation and evaluation, while simultaneously supplying critical support to educators. Educator ideas are already pouring in! You can view here.

 

The Department’s Open Innovation Portal will host the three-phase C2i.

• Phase 1, through October 19, asks teachers to share their most pressing classroom challenges that can be solved with $500 or less. The five ideas receiving the most votes — judged by the portal’s community — will receive $1,000 from the NEA Foundation.
• In Phase 2, from November 16 through January 14, teachers will post the best solutions to the five winning challenges. Up to 10 solutions will receive a $2,500 implementation grant from the NEA Foundation.
• In Phase 3, from January 17 through February 4, the NEA Foundation will select up to three solutions to receive a $5,000 planning grant and technical support.

These solutions will be posted on the Donors Choose Website, where teachers will be invited to submit requests to receive up to $500 in implementation costs. The NEA Foundation, with citizen philanthropists, will provide the funding for teachers to implement and test these innovation solutions.

More information on Challenge to Innovate is available here

Learn more about the Cooney Center’s Digital Age Teacher Preparation Council

 

 

President Obama is announcing our National STEM Video Game Challenge today at 3:15pm EST.

Tune in to the LIVE Webcast.

Inspired by the “Educate to Innovate” campaign, President Obama’s initiative to promote a renewed focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education, the National STEM Video Game Challenge aims to motivate interest in STEM learning among America’s youth by tapping into students’ natural passions for playing and making video games.

The first annual competition is being held by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media in partnership with sponsors AMD Foundation, Entertainment Software Association and Microsoft.  Founding outreach partners include the American Association of School Librarians, American Library Association, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, BrainPOP, and the International Game Developers Association.

See full press release

See White House press release

 

This Sunday, games based learning will be New York Times Magazine cover worthy (we semi-scooped them.)

Learning by Playing, by Sara Corbett, is a thorough overview of game play in the classroom, highlighting some successful  and revolutionary programs that are helping kids learn in school, most notably, Quest to Learn, a New York based school for digital kids. The school’s founder/director, Katie Salen, says she is “less apt to refer to a school as ‘school’ but rather as a ‘learning space’ or a ‘discovery space’ or sometimes as a ‘possibility space.'”

Corbett, the article’s author, spoke with Cooney Center’s executive director, Michael H. Levine, who recommends that we stop looking so critically at the way children use media and to start exploring how that energy might best be harnessed to help drive them academically. “Kids are literally wearing digital media,” he says. “It’s present everywhere in their lives, except for in the learning environment.”

Read the entire article here