Editor’s Note: Want to join the Joan Ganz Cooney Center team? Apply to be the 2016-2017 Cooney Center Fellow! We are accepting fellowship applications now through April 4, 2016.

“This can be a pretty quirky place–do you think she would feel comfortable here?” Apparently, this is one of the questions that Michael Levine asked Bárbara Brizuela, my dissertation advisor, before I became a Cooney Fellow in 2009. I think Bárbara was particularly proud of her response: “She went to MIT, how much quirkier can you get?”

I wanted to share a little bit of my experience with young scholars who may be interested in becoming Cooney Fellows themselves, so this is probably a good time to share this little known fact: the Cooney Center is not quite as quirky a place as the opening line may have led you to believe (and I can say that, because I went to MIT). I immediately found everyone to be quite down-to-earth and approachable. That is, if you’re not too distracted by the Sesame Street toys that sit on everyone’s desks, regardless of position, race, or gender.

Another little known fact about the Cooney Center: there are very few people that actually comprise “the Center.” In fact, it is not uncommon to hear around the Workshop, “Where exactly is the Cooney Center?” To which we reply, “These three offices.” This is, of course, an outstanding compliment. It’s hard to grasp that fewer than ten people are able to accomplish quite so much. This also means that, as a fellow, you are never short on things to do, projects to work on, papers to proof, or blogs to write.

For a person who finds it extremely difficult to say “no” to an opportunity, the Cooney Center can be a dangerous place. There are so many fascinating projects always looming on the horizon that I sometimes feels like a kid in a candy store (or, as I experienced yesterday with my daughter: a baby in a bookstore). Thankfully, Lori Takeuchi, our research director, does a good job of keeping everyone grounded. She’s the little voice in the back of our collective head always reminding us of our research priorities and asking the question “Does this project fit within our research priorities?” [For the record, those priorities are: (1) the new coviewing, (2) networked participation, and (3) bridging learning.] If something doesn’t fit within those priorities, but still seems “really cool,” we might just do it anyway.

Most of my time recently has been spent as project manager for the National STEM Video Game Challenge. Students, professionals, and amateur game designers have designed some amazing games aimed to teach young children science and math. From designing the project goals to evaluating entries, no small detail was overlooked as we figured out how this project would not only serve the Center and our priorities, but how we could best steer the project towards an outcome that could truly have an impact on children. Throughout the course of this project, I was fortunate enough to meet so many passionate people who care about education that it certainly impacted me and where I wish to steer my career in the future.

Overall, this experience is unlike any other postdoc one could find. Nowhere else in the world will you run independent research, work with a close-knit team who all have extremely diverse backgrounds, and have Muppets at your holiday party.

Learn more about the Cooney Center Fellows Program and download a PDF with more information about the 2011-2012 program, including qualifications, terms of the fellowship, and application timeline.

Attending the DML 2011 Conference this week in Long Beach? Don’t miss our workshop, The New Coviewing: Supporting Learning through Joint Media Engagement, Thursday, March 3, at 2:30 pm in International Ballroom II.

The Cooney Center, together with the LIFE Center, has been working throughout the 2010-2011 academic year to better understand the new coviewing (aka joint media engagement) with digital media. In this effort, we’ve been trying to identify modes of participation with media (including mobile, interactive, and online) that leverage co-participation, either in person or across distance.

Sesame Workshop has advocated coviewing throughout its 40-year history, noting that children gain more from watching Sesame Street when a parent or other adult is also actively engaged in viewing. Similarly, early investigations by the LIFE Center and other researchers have indicated the value of co-participation with a more capable partner (teacher, parent, sibling, friend, etc.) as a support for learning with digital media. From parents and children using online sites together, to siblings playing Wii, to grandparents reading to grandchildren via webcams and e-books, the new coviewing appears to be frequent, particularly in families with young children.

Additional information is needed, however, about the contexts in which coviewing is most valuable as well as impediments to shared media use. How do assumptions about television coviewing hold up in relation to digital media? How do modern family structures and new technologies work with or against coviewing strategies? How might media and technology products be designed to better support and encourage joint media engagement?

Come join the conversation! Our interactive workshop aims to generate design principles, research questions, and product ideas, all of which support the goal of encouraging the new coviewing in homes, classrooms, and expanded learning spaces.

Conference information and schedule can be found here: http://dmlcentral.net/conference2011

See you there,

Lori Takeuchi & Becky Herr-Stephenson

A funny thing happened at a Capitol Hill Caucus Event in  D.C.  last month–a moment of bipartisan agreement!  The sighting of this rare bird seems well worth noting–everyone who has been following the debate over painful budget cuts has been wondering if and when consensus might ever break out.

So I was delightfully surprised to be a part of a discussion of one issue that could, perhaps, be an important bridge across the political chasm: the role of digital technology–especially video games– to our nation’s economic and educational well-being.

February 16th marked the launch of the new Congressional Caucus for Competitiveness in Entertainment Technology (E-Tech Caucus) which is  co-chaired by Representatives Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Florida).  The co-chairs headlined the launch event, which drew a crowd of about 100 industry, policy and research leaders who are intrigued by the educational, commercial and civic value of games to make a positive difference in children’s lives. They spoke eloquently about the economic value of the videogames industry to new innovation clusters in nearly 40 states, and cited research from leading scientific groups such as the Federation of American Scientists and to our own work here at the Cooney Center. By the way, the bipartisan comity between the co-chairs has been stoked by off- the-Congressional-floor game play: Brady is the coach of the congressional women’s softball team on which Wasserman-Schultz stars!

I was asked to keynote the launch, and I am including my comments here:

Nearly 50 years ago—in the midst of President Kennedy’s urgent call for a national response to Sputnik, FCC Chairman Newton Minow shocked the nation’s broadcast community. He complained eloquently and forcefully that television—which was fast becoming the ubiquitous medium of the day—had become a “vast wasteland.” And he was right—there was no developmentally appropriate children’s programming available for national distribution.

A documentary producer, Joan Ganz Cooney, heard the speech as a clarion call. Forming the first private-public partnership in the modern television era, she and colleagues at Children’s Television Workshop fashioned an antidote to that wasteland with a little show called Sesame Street. Initially supported by a grant from Carnegie and Ford Foundation and the U.S. Office of Education, Sesame Street found a grateful audience of families and preschool kids, especially those who were behind their peers in the United States. Now seen in over 140 countries and by 100 million young children around the world, Sesame is still actively innovating on all of the platforms that children visit in a digital age. Mrs. Cooney’s entrepreneurial response and her invention of the field of educational media, quite simply, changed the world.

Today we hear worries about the new digital overload—a new vast wasteland for kids. Too much multi-tasking, cyber-bullying, an obese generation of “couch potato” children, school boredom and drop outs, and our educational race to the bottom all dot the media landscape. Many think that media are to blame! But recognizing that legitimate concerns do exist, are we focusing too much on the challenges and too little on the potential? Is it possible that digital media such as video games, virtual worlds, simulations and mobile apps can be a great ally in the national response to our new Sputnik moment? The new Caucus’ leadership can play a big part in starting a different conversation.

Last year, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, our center issued a major report on the potential value of digital media, with a special focus on video games. The study took a look at major new research on the potential of games to engage, educate and promote healthy development as well as some of the concerns that scientists are monitoring closely. Here are a few of the trends and findings we documented:

• Videogames are increasingly the play choice of younger and younger children. The average age of first video game play has moved down from age 8 in 2005 to close to 6 in 2010.

 

• Well-designed videogames that embed research and educational curriculum, when played for controlled periods of time, are associated with increases in spatial skills, systems thinking and collaborations skills. All of these have been defined by top employers as key 21st century employment skills.

 

 

• Research from the Mayo Clinic on a popular video game called Dance Dance Revolution—which has been adopted by the state of West Virginia for phys ed classes—shows that regular use of the game makes children more fit and more likely to continue to exercise.

 

 

• Research from the U.S. Department of Education as part of its “Ready-to-Learn” Program shows that mobile apps and games that are designed to teach emergent literacy skills to struggling readers can give a powerful lift to their vocabularies and decoding skills—both essential prerequisites to long-term success in school.

 

 

• New models of games-based learning are emerging across the country, stimulated by educational entrepreneurs, philanthropy and the private sector. In New York, former chancellor Joel Klein pioneered a new school, Quest2Learn, that incorporates game design skills and STEM knowledge as a new approach to learning. The MacArthur Foundation recently announced that the model will spread to Chicago and other cities. Pearson and other corporate partners are involved in scaling this model up.

 

 

• The military continues to use games-based simulations to prepare a new generation of combat ready and peacekeeping young men and women that are making our country and others more secure.

 

The new House Caucus is perfectly positioned to place a spotlight on innovation in the creative media industry, and to suggest incentives for new economic development that will help build social impact investment within the sector. By doing so, we can reframe the national conversation and engage a new generation of parents, teachers, pediatricians and youth professionals. Because ultimately, they will be the real game changers. Let’s give them some new tools to win the future!

If you are in New Haven on Friday, February 11, we invite you to attend the Zigler Center’s weekly social policy lecture series. Michael Levine will present a preview of Always Connected, a collaboration with the Sesame Workshop that will be published this spring, and The Impacts of Media Multitasking on Children’s Learning and Development. He will discuss the results of some recent studies about the constant flow of media that kids are consuming — often simultaneously — and the potential implications for healthy development.

11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Room 116, William L. Harkness Hall
100 Wall Street
This event is free and open to the public.

For more information: The Edward Zigler Center in Child Development & Social Policy at Yale University

In my first week on the job at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center I learned about two terrific Websites — Poptropica and Whyville. I dutifully recommended them to my brother and sister-in-law, who are ever in search of “good” digital media for their 8-year-old. “Thanks so much for these,” Debbie responded. “So helpful. I was just about to search the web for some good math sites for Marta… she definitely needs practice that is also fun. She’s holding her own but needs to pick up the pace. If you hear about any other sites or apps that are particularly good for math (second grade, counting coins etc.) please send them our way!”

My sister-in-law, like so many parents, is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. She wants to support what her daughter is learning in school with some digital at-home fun that aligns to the second grade curriculum.

I’m thrilled to be at the Cooney Center and join the national conversation about advancing children’s learning in the digital age. And I want to keep these questions on the front burners:

1. What’s the good stuff? And what are the tools that parents, grandparents, teachers, and others who care for kids can use to discriminate? Last year’s Cooney Center report, Learning: Is there an App for That? showed evidence that kids can learn from apps. So tell me how the content aligns to age developmental age and stage, what curriculum standards are being met, how well-produced the media. And then please tell me:

2.What’s the right media diet for kids? I want to know what the right balance is of screens-to-no-screens (is that even the right question to ask?), again at every age and stage, for every temperament, learning style, etc. According to the Cooney Center’s upcoming report, Always Connected, young kids are consuming about 4-5 hours of media a day. And the Kaiser Family Foundation reports that kids who are 8 years old are engaged with digital media in some form for more than 7.5 hours a day — outside of school! So can we discuss, please, what to feed them?

My career has been largely devoted to providing information about raising happy, healthy kids. When I was the Editor-in-Chief of Child Magazine in the 1990s I was lucky enough to have Penelope Leach as a contributor. One month, when she was writing a piece on kids and sleep, I asked her to provide a sidebar on how much total sleep children need at every age. She wouldn’t do it. “There’s no one answer and there’s no right answer,” she said. “But it’s what my readers want to know,” I pleaded. “Please, let’s answer their burning question.” She wouldn’t budge. So we compromised: she wrote a sidebar titled, “Why I Can’t Tell You How Much Sleep your Child Needs.” Did it appease the readers? Probably some of them. It was thoughtful, and of course true. But it wasn’t a sound bite, and I feared then (and would fear even more now) that it is hard to communicate smart and sometimes complex advice. So my last first-week question is this:

3.How should we send parents and educators all these messages? There’s amazing research being done, and some excellent resulting advice. But if it doesn’t reach the end-user — those of us dedicated to helping kids learn at home, in school, and after school, then the job is only half done.

The Sesame Workshop research team has been following the development of a game promoting intergenerational computer literacy. Mindy Brooks shares some of the lessons they’ve learned about designing an educational game that appeals to both parents and kids.

How do you design a game to engage both parents and children to play together and ultimately enhance the child’s literacy skills?

After hearing multiple exclamations from parents such as, “Watch out for that word!” or “No, that’s not the “t” sound!”, we (the Sesame Workshop research team) began to pick up on a very interesting pattern — parents did not understand they had an actual role in playing the game. In other words, they sat to the side and watched their children play, often making suggestions or corrections.

The game they were playing was the initial alpha version of an intergenerational computer literacy game designed for parents and children to play “together.” However, we quickly became aware that the very nature of a two player game will not guarantee that parents, in particular, will know what to do or how to play — not to mention enjoy the actual game. The question for the interdisciplinary team (producers, curriculum specialists, and research team), became how can we structure an intergenerational game play experience so that: a) parents will know they have a specific role to play in order to advance the game, b) the parent’s participation will further the learning process for their child, and c) there will be increases in scaffolding and positive interaction with fewer directives and passive observations (i.e., “Watch out for the word!”).

The primary goal of the intergenerational game was to create a literacy learning experience for a child through a game that engages a collaborative or “team” effort between a child and parent or younger child with an older child. This team effort requires that each participant contributes in a specific way (i.e., collecting target words and then unscrambling the words collected) in order to advance in the game, which subsequently enhances the learning experience for the child. In addition, the more the team works together the more points the team will receive which in turn unlock additional (and more educationally advanced) levels of game play.

Role of Formative Research Collaboration

We became acutely aware, after testing multiple times in different cities with diverse populations, that while excitement for an intergenerational game seemed high, parents and children needed more support and scaffolding to maximize the experience. Parents, in particular, had a hard time understanding that they had a strategic role in the game even though a basic instructional infrastructure was put in place. Despite a basic instructional infrastructure, it often took multiple game plays and/or researcher prompting for the parent to initiate game play (as evidenced by body position and even hand placement on the mouse). Even when parents understood that they had a role, they were still uncertain how to play the game with their child.

It was through the formative research testing process that a number of significant changes were made to the game that made it significantly stronger and more streamlined. Even though this process was specific to a couple games, we believe the implications of these changes are likely to reach to other games that are attempting to have two players work together collaboratively. We identified three major areas that should be considered for future work: role clarification, a point system, and additional support through added voiceovers, icons, and time out prompts.

First of all, when designing an intergenerational game there needs to be even further role clarification. We found that a typical instructional interface was not enough to engage parents and communicate their purpose. As a result, we tested out options about how to create more clarity regarding roles. What we found was that an interactive video tutorial adds an efficient and even fun way to provide role clarity. The tutorial introduces the player roles in a game play format by letting the pair interact with the game for a few seconds, and then follows up with further instructions. By initially establishing the roles through an interactive tutorial, it helped both players feel more comfortable and almost 100% of the participants were able to actively, not to mention enjoyably, engage in the game play experience.

We also found that another essential element to communicating roles and instructions was through the point system. Attention was brought to the points by making the on screen point tracker have corresponding sounds that reinforced (with both visual and audio cues) correct answers. In addition, the points were highlighted through the scoreboard (or a game summary screen) that clearly delineated how each player was progressing. By making the point system even more obvious during the game as well as after completing a round, it made it significantly easier for players to monitor their progress and to know that their actions significantly influenced their progress.

Moreover, by providing additional support through what seemed like minor changes, such as adding clickable support icons (like a “mouth” icon that when clicked repeated the target educational sound the team was supposed to collect), helped to repeat game goals and reinforce educational content and curricular goals. It was through these minor changes (i.e., strategically positioning icons that provide support and adding timeouts that reminded both players of their roles) on screen that brought attention and added voiceover prompts that the roles and game goals became clear to the teams.

Going Forward

When we started the process of testing the intergenerational games we heard exclamations of frustration, confusion, and lack of clarity. But at the later phases of the game development, we heard and saw a different form of interaction. It moved from a one-sided game play experience to one where parents sat down and almost immediately understood they had a purpose. Children knew to ask their parents for help and more attention was paid to the points system and how the points impacted how far they advanced. As we proceed with new innovative intergenerational game ventures, we will be keeping in mind that such an experience needs even further clarification and support than a normal game situation and that providing simple, yet intentional, instructions goes a long way in creating a game played “together.”

Mindy Brooks is the Research Analyst for Domestic Research at Sesame Workshop. She is responsible for leading field research for Sesame Workshop content including Sesame Street and Electric Company across all media platforms.

Want to join the Cooney Center Team? Apply to be the 2011-2012 Cooney Center Fellow! The Cooney Center Fellows Program encourages research, innovation, and dissemination to promote children’s learning. Fellows participate in a wide range of projects and, in doing so, develop broad exposure to scholarship, policy, and practice in the field of digital media and learning.

Learn more about fellowship projects, eligibility requirements, and how to apply.