Reprinted from Huffington Post.

As President Obama discusses our State of the Union with a much needed focus on innovation, education and investment in America’s future, let’s focus on one area that is ripe for radical change: how digital media can be used for education and hands-on, lifelong learning beginning right from the start.

We need to focus more attention on the potential long-term effects of a major investment in the early years, especially in building an entirely new learning equation for the children who will graduate in 2025. New studies and stronger investments in children under 10 are needed because relatively little research or breakthrough program development has been done on the preschool and middle-childhood periods, which scholars in child development, behavioral and cognitive psychology, and neuroscience have pointed to as critical for all that follows.

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The game that has knocked “Angry Birds Seasons” off its perch as the top free game in the iTunes store was designed by a self-taught 14-year-old programmer. According to ABC News, Robert Nay decided to design his own game after doing some research in the public library and downloading Corona, a software developer’s kit. With some help from his mother, the eighth grader spent a couple of hours each night over the course of a month designing “Bubble Ball,” a “physics puzzle game” that has wowed programmers twice his age. In an interview with Good Morning America, he admits that he was “astonished” that his app reached number one — it’s been downloaded more than 2 million times, and is still going strong.

Robert’s story highlights the success that motivated kids can achieve with parents and  mentors who provide guidance and access to the tools they need to reach for their dreams. Students interested in learning how to design their own games can use tools like Gamestar Mechanic to make and publish their own games.

How would Robert have fared if he’d entered the National STEM Prize Video Challenge’s Youth Prize? We’re looking forward to checking out the great entries that have been submitted by 5th-8th grade students — we imagine that one (or more!) of these games will also make quite a splash!

Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture a fraction of the depth and splendor of his or her imagination. Play inspires and scaffolds the creative process from an early age, but there is a persistent gap between the origins of imaginative play (ages 4-5) and kids’ adoption of the formal discipline of creative writing (ages 8+). At Launchpad Toys, we’re using mobile devices like the iPad to bridge this gap between informal and formal learning, to harness the power of play to help children capture and share their ideas with other kids around the world.

Why Is Play So Important?

While stuffed animal tea parties and standoffs between cops and robbers might seem rather recreational and luxurious to the average adult, researchers like Maria Montessori and Paulo Freire have shown imaginative play to be critical to a child’s social-emotional and oral language development. From a constructionist perspective, play is a social laboratory where kids learn by trying on, testing out, and adapting new ideas — just as they might costumes. As many parents can attest, it’s not uncommon to see one day’s “real-world” lessons being practiced in the next day’s dress-up session. Imaginative play is also critical to a child’s creative development. In play, kids become producers, writers, inventors, and artists by exercising their divergent thinking and storytelling skills — the building blocks of creative learning. As we described in Learning Across Silos: An Integrated Approach to the Creativity Crisis, imaginative play challenges kids to create their own characters, storylines, and fantasy worlds while thinking outside of the box to design novel and practical (creative) solutions to abstract problems.

Still, despite these rich opportunities for social and creative learning, there is a persistent gap between the playroom and the classroom. Kids learn as much about the world around them from their peers as they do from adults, teachers, or textbooks. Yet, open-ended play is difficult to assess and the scope of knowledge-transfer is inherently limited, which is why we all too often draw a line in the sand between formal and informal learning.

The New Frontier of Digital Play

Can you imagine if kids could not only capture their play as stories, but then share those stories with their peers around the world? What if kids could learn about geography, religion, and culture through the narrative play and stories of other children just like them?

Mobile devices like the iPad have opened the door to new digital play experiences that will realize this possibility and help to bridge the gap between formal and informal learning. Achieving this vision, however, requires that we as educational media designers shift our mindsets away from “games” to “play”. Mitch Resnick, Lego Professor of Learning at the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten group, says we need to start thinking about computers as paintbrushes — playful and open-ended tools for creative expression.

Why the iPad? Despite their common roots, imaginative play and games are actually quite different. Games are relatively rigid and linear – computer-guided missions that position the user behind layers of abstraction (mouse, joystick) and artificial guidelines (you can move here, but not there). Play, on the other hand, is open-ended and creative – kid-driven explorations that empower them to generate their own rules, relationships, and abilities. In this way, play is inherently oral, kinesthetic, tangible, social, and mobile. Play uses all the senses and goes anywhere, anytime. While there is certainly a great deal of hype around devices like the iPad, this much is certain: large touchscreens, positioning sensors, microphones, and mobile Internet connections empower us as designers to leap over traditional gaming barriers to pioneer a new frontier in digital play.

Bridging the Gap
At Launchpad Toys, we’re creating digital toys and tools that empower children to create, learn, and share their ideas through play. Our goal is to encourage and exercise kids’ creativity through Constructionist learning tools that enable kids and their parents to share their creative content with friends and family around the world. Our first product, Toontastic, is a creative learning tool for the iPad with which kids can draw and animate their own stories through narrative play. Toontastic scaffolds the storytelling process, introducing ideas like character, setting, narrative arc, and emotion while making cartoon animation as easy as putting on a puppet show.

Here are four lessons that we’ve learned about designing for digital play:

•    Grow with the child. In the toy industry, the best toys are often termed “Grow with Me Toys” – toys that retain their appeal and fun as the child gets older, but offer different benefits at different ages. LEGOs are a great example of a “Grow with Me Toy” – the play pattern and basic mechanic of snapping bricks together stays consistent from Duplos to Mindstorms, but the play patterns and learning goals change dramatically as the child’s needs and abilities mature. As a result, LEGOs are rarely a “flash in the pan” investment – kids will continue to play with them from age 3 through… well, adulthood (ahem).

Our hope is that Toontastic will grow with our users from age five until, well, their iPad bites the dust. We don’t expect our youngest users to grasp the complexities of narrative arc and scene types, but our aim is to make the animation process and the user interface intuitive enough that young children can work through the software and enjoy the simple process of creating stories. With age and repetition, we hope that those young users will then grow in time to understand the more complex concepts inherent in the software – much like many young LEGO builders move on to create stop-motion animations and program robots.

•    Beware the “Digital Tutor.” Encourage parent collaboration. Creating educational software doesn’t require you to bottle a teacher inside your game. Good teachers are dynamic, charismatic, and are really good listeners – computers are not. As educational media designers, we should be creating software tools that encourage conversations and collaborative learning rather than trying to instruct or quiz the child. Parents are looking for opportunities to play and co-create with their kids. Support them with supplementary materials that will help them to teach their children rather than relying on the software to be a tutor.

With Toontastic, our goal is not to “teach” the children directly, but to introduce concepts and then provide a laboratory in which to experiment with those ideas. In turn, our hope is that parents will not only play along with their children, but provide supplemental instruction. To aid parents, we provide detailed help screens on every page as well as a Parent/Teacher guide full of prompts, story starters, and questions for the child.

•    Spark the imagination. Just as dolls, puppets, action figures, and costumes are “story starters” for imaginative play, it’s important to provide creative catalysts that will start a child down a path without providing too many guidelines and restrictions. Blank canvases are essential, but many kids will need a creative nudge or two along the way.

In Toontastic, we offer customizable characters and pre-drawn settings in addition to open-ended drawing tools. We’ve found that kids often gravitate towards ready-made characters their first few times playing, but then quickly graduate to designing their own characters and settings from scratch.

•    Reward iteration. Learning isn’t a one-stop shop. Kids evolve their ideas and knowledge over time, so use small rewards and social feedback forums to encourage repeat play.

Our ultimate goal for Toontastic is to create what we’re calling “A Global Storytelling Network for Kids, by Kids” – a place where kids can upload their stories, receive constructive feedback from their peers, and then adapt their stories accordingly. When a child completes a cartoon, he or she nominates that cartoon for a “badge” (Think “Boy Scouts meets Academy Awards”). Through our ToonTube website, viewers can vote to give the cartoon a “Thumbs Up” and (eventually) provide written feedback. Once the child earns enough votes, the badge is awarded along with a new character that can be used to create yet another cartoon, thereby creating what we hope to be a virtuous cycle of story creation.

If you’re interested in reading more on digital play and creative learning, we invite you to join the discussion on Launchpad Toys’ blog. Information on Toontastic is available on the company’s website and in the iTunes App Store.

Andy Russell is an educational media producer and a co-founder of Launchpad Toys, finalists for the Cooney Center’s 2010 Mobile Learning Grant Prize. Inspired by the movie BIG and a lifelong obsession with small, brightly colored plastic bricks, Andy designs digital toys and tools that empower kids to create, learn, and share their ideas through play.

Last weekend’s CES was the big event for everyone watching out for innovative technology — and according to reports, the conference exhibitors focused heavily on tablet devices, especially the iPad (see David Pogue’s review of CES in the New York Times). We were thrilled for our colleagues who won KAPi awards at the Kids@Play Summit, especially E-Line Media for most creative game platform (Gamestar Mechanic) and Krista Marks’ Kerpoof Studios. For more about the innovations in kids media that were unveiled at CES, please read Becky Herr-Stephenson’s recent blog post.

Why Low Performing Schools Need Digital Media
S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, argues that black and Latino youth are just as digitally “engaged as their white, Asian, and more affluent counterparts,” and that they are just as, if not more, likely to have access to mobile devices for social, recreational, and entertainment purposes. Watkins suggests that we can raise the quality of learning by encouraging students to use the technology that they already possess. Can we engage “resistant students” in low-performing schools by reinventing their environments? (Huffington Post)

Growing Up Poor Zaps Your Mental Abilities By the Time You’re Two
Perhaps not surprisingly, psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin have determined that income levels do, in fact, have a marked effect on a child’s cognitive potential — in this study of 750 sets of twins, children from poorer families showed signs of mental stagnation before they reached the age of 2. The findings suggest that children from wealthier families are not necessarily genetically smarter, but that they have more opportunities to develop their cognitive potential than their poorer counterparts — and provides more food for the “nature or nurture” debate. (Good)

Report Finds Parental Monitoring Software May Carry Privacy and Liability Risks
According to a recent report published by School Safety Partners, parents who install anti-bullying and anti-sexting software to monitor their kids’ activities online may inadvertently be giving up their family’s privacy. With some companies, parents are essentially granting the company the right to publish all private messages and photos transmitted through the. Also, the company may also reserve the right to notify law enforcement agencies without first notifying parents or children first. This article reminded us that as tedious as it can be, it’s important to read the Terms of Service agreements when we sign up for a new service. Read more for tips on learning more about potential services and protecting your family’s privacy. (School Safety Partners)

Becky Herr Stephenson is a Research Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. She attended the Kids@Play Summit at CES 2011, which focused on the way technology is changing how kids learn and play. She shares some highlights with us here:

The Kids@Play Summit at CES reaffirmed for me that the best technologies are those that are obviously disruptive — technologies that challenge our expectations about what learning and schooling should look like, about who can participate in creation and production, and about how adults and children should interact around digital media like games and virtual worlds. Kids@Play featured technologies ranging from digital blocks (Sifteo) to electronic books to mobile apps.

The Cooney Center’s own Michael Levine and our friend and collaborator Sara DeWitt from PBS Kids presented findings from our recent report, Learning: Is There an App for That? — they managed to both impress and disgust the audience with demos of the apps discussed in the report. (Check out the PBS Kids Apps page, and take a close look at the demo for the Martha Speaks Dog Party app to see why the audience was both impressed and disgusted.) Presenters and participants alike noted the importance of questioning claims about the educational value of apps without more evaluation like that begun in the Cooney Center report.

While the entire summit was a great event, three panels stand out as my favorites:

It’s a Movement: The first panel I attended was focused on gaming systems that encourage physically active play. Due to concerns about kids’ fitness and health (as well as evidence that games that get players up and moving around can be really fun), active play appears to be a huge growth area in gaming. The panel presentations ranged from a demo of Sony’s Playstation Move system to a skateboarding game by Omek Interactive. By far, however, my favorite presentation on the panel was from HOPSports, a company that makes an interactive system for use in physical education classes, after school programs, and community centers.

Anything that can make gym class a little less harrowing for non-athletes like myself gets my full approval — and HOPSports seems to fit the bill. The system is built around fitness videos focused on different sports and physical activities. However, instead of Richard Simmons or Jane Fonda leading the workout, a host of professional athletes guide students through training for a specific sport, ranging from soccer to stunts. Including popular culture kids care about — appearances by celebrity athletes and popular music — is key to upping the cool factor of the system (and, by extension, kids’ buy-in to the activities.) And, while watching a gym full of students repeat in unison the action modeled by a giant, floating projection of an athlete sometimes feels like something straight out of Orwell’s 1984, it seems clear that HOPSports is a great resource for 2011 and beyond.

3D Moms: Like the movement panel, the presentations during this session addressed an area of concern in children’s uses of digital media — the possibilities and problems of 3D media. 3D is another area in which huge growth has been seen in the past few years — nearly every family movie is released in 3D, manufacturers have begun producing 3D televisions for home use, and consumers are beginning to see gadgets like the Nintendo 3DS hitting shelves (sometimes with ambiguous warnings about allowing children to use the product). Despite all this growth, very little is actually known about how children understand and respond to 3D media, including whether or not 3D should be considered a tool for learning. Further, the effects of 3D on children’s developing eyesight are just beginning to be understood.

This panel pulled together experts from all sides of the 3D issue, including an optometrist and representatives from Texas Instruments and NVidia, companies that have been heavily involved in producing 3D media for games and simulations. Personally, I found it interesting to think about how much 3D media is already available (for example, in the form of PC games) and to learn that TI and other companies are actively investing in bringing 3D resources into K-12 schools. While I have little interest in watching movies in 3D myself (during this session, I learned that my eyes aren’t pointed correctly to fully enjoy 3D anyway), I am very interested in seeing resources for simulation make their ways into educational spaces, and after seeing this panel, I am more hopeful than ever that this is a reality.

The Changing Virtual World: This panel looked at three very different kinds of virtual worlds for kids: one built around curriculum, one built around a product, and one built by its participants. What I found most interesting about this panel is the way each presenter (and, presumably, each company represented) thinks about children as participants, citizens, and active learners. Whereas two of the virtual worlds were very much adult-created and adult-driven worlds to which children were invited to visit and given limited agency, the third, WhyVille, appears to take an opposite approach, addressing children and teens as full citizens with rights and responsibilities — not only for being in the space, but for making the space what it is. Kids do not get opportunities like this nearly enough!

I think it’s clear how each of these panels spoke to the idea of disruptive technologies — by getting kids out of their seats at school, by bringing 3D resources to classrooms and students who otherwise would not have access to them, or by providing spaces for kids to build, interact, experiment, and feel a real sense of ownership and responsibility. While much of the technology on the floor at CES focused on individual user experiences — customizing one’s iPad or collecting and storing one’s video collection — the vibe at Kids@Play felt different, instead privileging technologies that facilitate social interaction, sharing, and creation. Both the disruptive nature of the technologies featured at Kids@Play and the focus on shared interaction and community are incredibly encouraging, and I look forward to seeing what the coming year has in store for everyone at the summit!

Here are some of the stories and videos that caught our interest this past week – highlights feature the growing movement to include iPads in the classroom and a Q&A with Michael Levine, Cynthia Chiong, and Carly Shuler about the recent report, “Learning: Is There an App for That?” Check back next week for reports from CES 2011, taking place this weekend in Las Vegas.

Study: Doctor Visits Give Opportunity for School Readiness Check-up
EdWeek’s Inside School Research blog looks at the Bellevue Project for Early Language, Literacy, and Education Success and some recent studies of its recent parent-education interventions. The results suggest that because pediatricians have regular contact with young children and their parents during a child’s early years, doctors are uniquely positioned to monitor and “prescribe” reading and parent engagement to help develop a scaffold for early child development. By providing suggestions and feedback on reading and play activities that encourage early literacy, family pediatricians may be able to help disadvantaged parents better prepare their children for school.  (EdWeek)

Math That Moves: Schools Embrace the iPad
The New York Times reports that more schools are incorporating iPads in the classroom — from kindergarten on up. “I think this could very well be the biggest thing to hit school technology since the overhead projector,” says one teacher. Will the iPad prove itself to be a powerful educational tool and more than just a cool — if expensive – new toy? (The New York Times)

Eye Specialists Question Nintendo’s Warning on 3-D Technology and Children

Nintendo recently announced that parents should not allow children under 6 to use the 3-D feature of its new 3DS handheld device because it could harm eye development. Perhaps surprisingly, pediatric opthalmologists disagree and suggest that the warning is not based on scientific evidence. (The New York Times)

Effort to Restore Children’s Play Gains Momentum
The Times also reports on the growing emphasis on allowing children to engage in imaginative play. The movement has focused on the educational value of play, campaigning schools to restore recess and unstructured playtime in early childhood and elementary school curricula, but is increasingly reaching out to parents to emphasize the importance of providing free time and access to space. (The New York Times)

Finding Value in Mobile Learning Apps
MindShift interviews the Cooney Center’s Michael Levine, Cynthia Chiong, and Carly Shuler about some of the results of the recent report, “Learning: Is There an App for That?” in which they highlight the value of mobile learning apps as potential tools for educational engagement. (MindShift)

Mobile Learning Could Be Key in Achievement Gap Equation
A recent study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project that shows that the key to closing the digital divide could be mobile learning. While activists have struggled to get broadband access and desktop computers into under-served communities for years, a better understanding of how communities are using the digital tools they have on hand may provide even access to students on their own ground. (MindShift)

Is Technology Wiring Teens to Have Better Brains?
PBS NewsHour’s Miles O’Brien’s report on multitasking and the brain looks at “digital natives” – adolescents who are constantly juggling homework, games and chatting with friends simultaneously – and asks if and how the technologies they are using are shaping their brains. Dr. Jay Giedd, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, is engaged in a 20-year study to examine the effects of the internet, iPods, and constant connectivity on young minds. (NewsHour)

If you are attending the Consumer Electronics Show this week, be sure to check out the Kids at Play Summit on Saturday, January 8. Michael H. Levine, Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, will be speaking on a panel with Sara DeWitt, Vice President of PBS Kids Interactive and Robert Bole, Vice President of Digital Media Strategy at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The panel will take place at 11:40 a.m. at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Check out the Kids @ Play website for directions and more detailed information on the full agenda, which includes presentations about some of the latest games, toys and educational products designed for kids for all ages, as well as “Reports from Mommyland,” a series of panels that will be of special interest to the parents who so often act as the gatekeepers between their children and digital media.