It’s hard to believe that the National STEM Video Game Challenge has come to a close. The Cooney Center team has just returned from D.C., where we invited the six finalists of the Collegiate and Developer streams of the competition to the Quick-Pitch Competition on Tuesday, March 29. Each team had a total of 20 minutes to present their prototypes and answer questions before a panel of judges at the Pew Center for American Life.

We were thrilled to see the energy and creativity that these developers brought to their games, and invigorated by the judges’ lively and provocative conversations — their passion for quality games and nurturing the careers of aspiring developers was inspiring. Our distinguished panel of judges included Warren Buckleitner, Editor, Children’s Technology Review; Alan Gershenfeld, Founder & President, E-Line Media; Eric Huey, ESA‘s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs; Shirley Malcom, Head of Education and Human Resources, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Melvin Ming, Chief Operating Officer, Sesame Workshop; and Ward Tisdale, Director of Global Community Affairs, Advanced MicroDevices (AMD).

On Wednesday, March 30, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra announced the winners of the Developer Competition and presented a video of the Youth Prize winners at The Atlantic’s Technologies in Education Forum at the Newseum. Congratulations to Filament Games’ Dan Norton and Dan White, who received the Grand Prize for You Make Me Sick!, a game that teaches children about the physical structure of bacteria and viruses, as well as how they are spread. Graduate students Derek Lomas (Carnegie Mellon University), Dixie Ching (New York University) and Jeanine Sun (University of California at San Diego) were awarded the Collegiate Prize as well as the Impact Prize for NumbaPower: Numbaland! The collection of four games allows children from kindergarten to grade 4 to construct a set of skills that helps develop their sense of number concepts. The games will be available on different platforms, including the iPad later this spring.

The finalists were:

A special note of congratulations goes out to the winners of our Popular Vote, Green World and Ko’s Journey.

We extend our deepest thanks and wish the best of luck to everyone who participated in the National STEM Video Game Challenge for making it such a great success.

Learn more about the National STEM Video Game Challenge and read the full press release.

Kudos to the Center for the exciting and impressive line-up for the “Learning from Hollywood” Forum this coming May at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.

I cannot imagine a more influential group in shaping our nation’s future than the media producers who are reaching our youngest children every day during the hours they are spending outside of school. The Forum’s dual focus on learning from Hollywood’s creative genius and challenging producers to help children learn key literacy skills could really move the needle.

Learning, literacy and media are keen passions of mine. And I think that we have proven that the consumption of media does not have to be at cross-purposes with the pursuit of educational value. If Sesame Street has proven anything in the over four decades we have been producing programming, it is that informal education can create measurable impact of enduring value.

Almost fifty years ago, then FCC Commissioner Newt Minow famously characterized television as a “vast wasteland.” Public and private sectors were not aligned and funding for innovation was sparse. Of course, Sesame Street and the shows that followed in its footsteps changed that, and today there more than 70 preschool programs in the US alone aimed at educating and entertaining young children.

But now children are facing a new vast wasteland in their digital offerings—a wasteland, frankly, that’s scaring many parents and educators. In a world where videogames, virtual worlds, and mobile media are ubiquitous, shouldn’t we expect that some of them will meet children’s educational needs?

This Forum will bring together the right partners so that we can find new ways to innovate, engage, and educate. A new vision for digital media is sure to emerge from the collaboration of Hollywood, educators, researchers, and policy makers who will be represented at the Forum.

Collaboration has always been a key to effecting meaningful change. The Cooney Center has already begun to unite the field in common cause through its research, its new game and mobile learning models, and leadership convenings like the Forum.

No matter how media continue to evolve, the key issue for the center and the field comes back to one key question that hasn’t changed: How can we use emerging media to help children learn? I look forward to exploring these issues in Los Angeles next month!

Joan Ganz Cooney co-founded the Children’s Television Workshop (since renamed Sesame Workshop) in 1968 and has created children’s programming, including Sesame Street, The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, and Dragon Tales, for more than three decades. She served as President and Chief Executive Officer of Sesame Workshop until 1990 and is currently Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Workshop’s board.

How can technology allow us to provide teachable moments and meaningful interactions across challenges of everyday life? How can a single parent who works until 9:00 at night help a child with homework assignments after school? Is there a way for distant relatives to read story books together with young children despite being far apart? What would a video game for children and grandparents to play together look like?

These are just a few of the possible scenarios that characterized discussions at the Cooney Center’s recent DML Conference workshop, The New Coviewing: Supporting Learning through Joint Media Engagement.

This year marked the 2nd annual conference on Digital Media and Learning, hosted by the Macarthur Foundation. As the name implies, the DML Conference brought together a community of of educators, media industry professionals and academics for three dynamic days of innovation, design, and discussion. Other workshops offered at the conference included hands-on activities in robot programming for kindergartners, computer hacking for kids, and challenges like designing a serious game for learning after being given a theme of “honor” and a game structure like “Tetris.”

The New Coviewing Workshop was led by our Research Director, Lori Takeuchi and Cooney Center Research Fellow, Rebecca Herr-Stephenson in collaboration with the LIFE Center. Attendees came from incredibly varied positions and backgrounds including academics, leaders in K-12 school settings and non-profit youth groups, as well as media designers working in television, games and museums.

So, what is “the new coviewing?” Over the past 40 years, researchers have examined behaviors of coviewing among families watching Sesame Street; however, now that we’ve entered the digital age, families interact with and learn from one another across many other forms of media and in various settings. Sesame Workshop has developed and conducted research on a number of projects that aim to capitalize on intergenerational learning opportunities. Among them, Electric Racer, a video game for literacy learning, led to some interesting research findings. Researchers in media and the learning sciences have determined that a new framework is needed to assess these new types of interactions, hence: the new coviewing.

To kick off the workshop, Becky and Lori took us through a variety of video clips featuring instances of joint media engagement (JME) — spontaneous and designed experiences of people using media together. After a discussion of the videos, workshop participants broke into small groups and completed design challenges to provide interactive solutions for families with constrained budgets, time and technological abilities. The diversity of experience among groups became apparent as they developed solutions to problems like how to engage a classroom full of kids with limited technology and how parents with limited English skills might still be able to help their children with web-based homework. Designs incorporated existing technology and infrastructure, as well as the potential to employ every learner, across all generations, as a potential teacher.

We look forward to continuing the conversation around The New Coviewing and welcome further input and feedback from DML workshop participants!

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.

I’ll be honest—I applied for the Cooney Center Fellowship for the Muppets. As a lifelong fan of Sesame Street, the idea of working in an environment that valued Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, and Grover as much as I do was extremely appealing. Upon learning more about the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, however, I discovered that the Muppets were just the beginning of what makes it special. I feel fortunate to work with supportive colleagues who are as committed as I am to supporting young children’s learning, to understanding how digital media is used by families and educators, and to thinking about creative solutions to access and achievement gaps.

During my fellowship so far, I have been involved in a number of projects, ranging from helping orchestrate a workshop about joint media engagement (what we at the Center are calling the new coviewing), assisting at a meeting of our Digital Age Teacher Preparation Council, to participating in field research on collaboration at a Boys and Girls Club in East Harlem. Although diverse, each of these projects have allowed me to refine my research, writing, and professional communication skills and have put me in contact with others working in the area of digital media and learning.

These days, I do most of my work for the Center from California, where I’m busily planning an event designed to bring together media and technology producers, educators, researchers, policymakers, and funders to think about possibilities and challenges of further incorporating digital media into kids’ learning ecologies—home, school, and expanded learning spaces like after school programs. I’m developing a research project related to the event, designed to capture and analyze the ideas that emerge. Juggling both of these tasks, along with participating in other research projects going on at the Center, keeps me busy with engaging and challenging work.

During my six months at the Center, I’ve learned that Fellows need to be flexible and willing to jump in on projects as they develop. By doing so, I have had opportunities to learn more about digital media in middle childhood, to work with amazing colleagues and partners, and to develop new research skills and techniques. I may have come for the Muppets, but have stayed for the unique opportunities and challenges the Center offers for Fellows.

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.

With the recent release of the iPad 2, I was not at all surprised when Catherine suggested that I write this week’s blog about kids and the iPad. Considering the bulk of work we’ve been doing in the area of kids and apps, I thought this would be an easy topic. But when I actually sat down to write, I found it difficult to settle on a niche. In the last few months in The New York Times alone, David Pogue discussed a parent’s struggles around letting his children use such devices, Warren Buckleitner did an excellent summary on why the iPad is such a great device for kids, and there was a fantastic article about the iPad in schools. With the topic of kids and iPads getting so much press, what could I write about that hadn’t already been covered?

As I was thinking of an angle, I decided to check out Twitter. And that’s when an interesting idea occurred to me. What does the Twitter community have to say about kids and the iPad? So I searched for the terms “kids” and “iPad”, and it turned out that in the past 24 hours there were 441 tweets (not including retweets) that contain these two words. What I found was all at once overwhelming, inspirational, and entertaining.

Tweeters had a lot to say, ranging from the amusing (“Honey, the kids are playing with my iPad again. They don’t allow me to use it at all. Can I get the new iPad 2?”) to the insightful (“Special purpose communication devices for Autistic kids run from $3K-$10K. Many can’t afford them. iPad + $200 app is cheaper AND better.”) Though the tweets clearly varied widely, they did seem to fall into systematic categories:

The parents looking for advice:

• – “You know any good #kids apps for #ipad for my 3 year old daughter?? Any help appreciated :-)”
• – “We are using a brilliant App called MusicStudio, has anyone else used this with kids?”
• – “How do educational apps on android compare to apple ones?”

The parents giving advice:

• – “Do you have kids who love dinosaurs? National Geographic releases Ultimate Dinopedia app for the iPad.”
• – “Nice iPad 2 overview, though I disagree about capacity if you have kids. My kids fill all 64GB with video for road-trips easy.”
• – “A kindle it is…kids would spend all day arguing over who can use the iPad anyway ;)”

The naysayers:

• – “Do kids really need books on iPad? What about the power of their imagination!”
• – “People can’t feed their kids healthy food, but got them an iPad 2?”
• – “Hates little kids that have an iPhone and an iPad and they’re 7years old. I got my first shitty, brick phone when I was 11.”

The idealists:

• – “I bet kids in music school don’t need to haul around tuners, metronomes or stacks of music anymore. They just use an iPhone or iPad. Lucky!”
• – “iPad worth the hype? Here is why we love it so much. It’s opened up a new world for my 2 kids.”
• – “Ppl laughed at me when my 6yr old got an iPad for her birthday, but now she knows all 50 states by shape a geography and their kids don’t.”

The educators:

• – “Hanging out with #SFU education professor emerita Selma Wasserman as she demos a new iPad app that helps kids learn to read. Very cool.”
• – “See app for iPad – parent/ teachers read an electronic book to kids. Would work for ELLS.”
• – “B&N Adds Nook Kids iPad App.”

The ones I don’t understand:

• – “Ipad! We hebben er ook één!!! Leuk voor ons en voor de kids.”
• – “これかわいすぎる…！！「【子供iPhoneiPadkidsアプリ】HamTouch！癒し系リアルなハムスター飼育　3/16まで115円”
• – “De kids luisteren wel vooral via iPad, veelal YouTube. Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, dat soort dingen :-)”

The social commentators:

• – “The six-floor flagship Shanghai Barbie store is officially closed. Kids would rather play with an ipad.”
• – “Anyone even TRYING to compete with the IPad should just lower their prices and pray that parents are too cheap to get their kids a real one.”
• – “My kids would rather watch a movie huddled around the iPad vs. spread out on the couch in front of the flat panel TV. You win, Steve.”
• – “Those speaking about iPad specs are those that were born with the PC. My kids don’t care about specs. They care about apps.”

The people trying to sell something:

• – “Little Scribes: Bible Flash Cards is now available on the App Store! For iPhone and iPad! Your kids will thank you! “
• – “Do you have an iPad? Do you have kids? Here’s a great digital kids book for you.”
• – “The Crayola ColorStudio HD – iMarker and iPad App for Kids”
• – “Bilingual, fun, educational #app for #iPhone #iPad teaches kids ABCs, numbers & more.”

While this exercise provided me with (too many) hours of amusement, I actually think that these groupings provide a telling cultural snapshot on the topic of kids and iPads. There are parents looking for advice and parents giving it. There are the naysayers who think the idea of kids using iPads is ridiculous, and the idealists who think the iPad could change the world. There are those trying to use the new technology to educate. There’s stuff I don’t understand and commentary on what this all really means. There’s a whole bunch of people trying to sell stuff. And there have been 43 new tweets on kids and apps since I started writing this blog.

Follow Carly on Twitter.

Photo by novemberwolf on Flickr

Last week, our colleagues at Microsoft announced the full availability of the Kodu Game Lab for the PC and the launch of a nationwide Kodu Cup competition. The competition invites students, aged nine to 17 to design, build and submit their own video games. This post by Cooney Center Research Fellow Gabrielle Cayton-Hodges originally appeared on the Microsoft Unlimited Potential blog.

There’s a growing body of evidence that both playing video games and making video games have promise as educational tools. In fact, it may be one of the most effective ways to engage today’s youth as they learn the critical skills they will need to succeed. As the Federation of American Scientists concluded from its 2006 Summit on Educational Games:

“The success of complex video games demonstrates that games can teach higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and adaptation to rapid change. These are the skills U.S. employers increasingly seek in workers and new workforce entrants. These are the skills more Americans must have to compete with lower cost knowledge workers in other nations.”

In fact, game-based learning has emerged as one of the most promising areas of innovation in making Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) topics more engaging for kids today. The report Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health, demonstrates that video games can be used to learn not only content, but also STEM skills and systems thinking, which are essential for preparing youth for STEM careers.

Additionally, real-time 3-D action video games have been proven to improve cognitive skills such as attention and other executive functioning. These skills enhance learning in a wide array of areas and are also tied to number sense, a skill critical for early math learning in and out of school.

Researchers are finding that making games fosters the development of critical STEM skills. Our colleagues at E-line Media have shown that a well-designed game is a well-designed system with a delicate balance of goals, constraints, challenges and rewards. Learning how to create and edit such a system is learning critical analytic skills including systems thinking, problem solving, iterative design and digital media literacies.

This is not to say that we advocate children playing all video games and without restriction. Many games obviously have violent themes that are not age-appropriate. And some genres of games have proven more beneficial than others. For example, the cognitive skills that are enhanced with 3D action game play are not enhanced by other game genres, such as simulation games. We also know that some games are better for “transfer” than others (for example, playing many hours of Tetris will make you very quick at rotating Tetris shapes, but no better at any other mental rotations). There is still a lot of research to be done in this area, so we encourage parents to look critically and wisely at the games their children are playing. If something looks inappropriate, be cautious, but also keep an open mind while exploring redeeming qualities.

This past winter in the U.S., the Cooney Center and E-line Media launched the National STEM Video Game Challenge, in partnership with sponsors AMD Foundation, Entertainment Software Association and Microsoft. The goals were: (1) encouraging children to create video games and (2) encouraging game developers to make games that can truly educate and inspire children in STEM subjects. This effort was a huge success, with over 550 applications. Fourteen Youth winners (grades 5-8) were recently named and the Developer winners will be named on March 30th in Washington, D.C. Our Youth submissions came from programs designed to teach kids how to make games (such as Kodu and Gamestar Mechanic) as well as open platforms such as Flash that are frequently used by adult game developers. Developer finalists submitted games in many platforms–from SMS to Flash to Unity–and over many content areas, from biology to number sense to systems thinking.

For a sneak peek at some games that were entered into the challenge, take a look at our Popular Vote Award contestants and the winner, Ko’s Journey, which is a promising example of mathematics being integrated into the storyline of a game.

Join us for a Twitter party hosted by Mom It Forward and Microsoft Kodu Cup, featuring a panel of experts to discuss ways to develop a child’s problem-solving skills and creativity through technology. The party will be held Tuesday, March 22 from 9-11 pm ET (8 pm CT, 7 pm MT, 6 pm PT). Learn more about how to join the Twitter party here.

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning conference to discuss mobile learning. As our good friends at Project Noah and other games/apps like The Hidden Park have shown, mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad present incredible opportunities for developers like ourselves to get kids out of the house, learning about the world around us, and sharing their findings with peers around the globe.

Inevitably, the Million-Dollar-Question arose:

How do apps like Toontastic benefit from mobile?

To answer this, let’s hop into the DeLorean and take a trip back to a magical time when wearing your jeans backwards was ‘ill and Hypercolor seemed like a good idea. Yes, I’m talking about 1995 and the dawn of Edutainment CD-ROMs. Throughout the mid-late 90’s, multimedia titles like The Magic School Bus, Math Blaster, and Reader Rabbit blended curricular workbooks and cartoon entertainment by turning animated characters into tutors and problem sets into games. The rich affordances of the CD-ROM enabled developers to create engaging and impactful content but ultimately proved to be a double-edged sword — with the luxury of high-quality sound, video, and animation came the strict limitations of the desktop PC. As play moved from the kitchen table and the living room carpet to the home office, it became less collaborative and open-ended and more solitary, linear, and defined. Just as Woody, Buzz, and the finger-paints found themselves usurped by the mouse and keyboard, parents and siblings began to take a back seat to an animated Barney as kids’ play partners and mentors.

Today, mobile devices like the iPad enable kids to play and learn anytime, anywhere. Immediately, our minds leap to interactive museums and nature trails, but the journey from the upstairs office to the kitchen island may be equally if not more impactful. By situating learning in family spaces, we enable kids to play alongside mom and dad while they cook dinner or clean up the house and, in turn, enable parents, siblings, grandparents, and cousins to step in as mentors, tutors, collaborators, and playmates.

Sylvia Marino, a mother of three and an advocate for mobile learning through her work at Startl, explains how the simple convenience of devices like the iPad has changed the play dynamic in her home. “Apps make learning and play portable and easy. Rather than having to go over to the computer every time there is a question or sit and watch what the kids are doing, we can instead hangout together. I may be at my desk working while the kids are playing with an app in my office or we can be simply sitting on the couch, passing the iPad back and forth.”

As educational media designers, this new dynamic opens up a world of possibilities — eschewing animated Barneys in favor of Parent Guides and Quick-Help screens with “Questions to Ask” and “Story Starters”. Instead of bottling lesson plans and building robot tutors, mobile devices allow us to create online community spaces for teachers and homeschoolers to share best practices for facilitating hands-on learning. Rather than design for one child and one mouse, we can build collaborative playspaces for many fingers and many voices — the holy grail of intergenerational play.

It’s important, however, to remember that this new collaborative model depends on the parent to step in and participate. As Lorraine Ackemann of MomsWithApps reminds us, “When we bring an iPad into the home, we have a choice about how it is integrated into the menu of family activities. The iPad can either become an exciting new option for ‘family game night,’ or it can become an electronic babysitter. My hope is that we choose the former, and the way we do this is by playing alongside our kids.” As developers for mobile learning, we wholeheartedly agree and are doing everything we can to encourage and support co-play, collaboration, and parent-child dialogue, which is ultimately the greatest learning tool parents can provide. As Dan Donahoo of WIRED’s GeekDad.com points out, “The relationships we have with our children support their development better than any educational theory or learning tool. I look for apps that don’t just help my children to learn, but help me to learn to be a more engaged parent.”

So what do apps like Toontastic gain from mobile? In short, devices like the iPad enable designers to move away from solitary “interactive learning adventures” to create open-ended, playful, and collaborative tools for intergenerational play – to integrate (instead of exclude) the child’s greatest mentor and advocate: family.

Andy Russell is an educational media producer and a co-founder of Launchpad Toys. Inspired by the movie BIG and a lifelong obsession with small brightly colored plastic bricks, Andy is a graduate of Learning Design programs at Stanford and Northwestern and has worked for companies like Hasbro and Sony PlayStation to design playful learning experiences for kids.

On Monday, March 14, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop released Always Connected, a report about the digital media habits of young children.

It has come to our attention that the statistic cited regarding children under age 5 and their use of the Internet was stated incorrectly in the press release that was issued. The study results showed that almost 25% percent of parents of children five and under say that their children use the Internet. Of those young children who do go online, 82% do so weekly.

We also discovered a design error in a table featured in the report. The x-axis of the table was improperly labeled, causing some confusion. The table has been corrected in the PDF of the report, which is available online.

We regret this error and apologize for any inconvenience. And thank you to those who graciously directed our attention to our mistakes so we could correct them. We’re grateful for your interest in our work.

– The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop

Today, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop are releasing a new report entitled Always Connected. The report is a synthesis of data from seven studies and presents a comprehensive look at young children’s media use over the past five years. As someone who is interested in research methodology, and as one of the authors, the report has encouraged me to think more carefully about the way we define and measure media use.

Measurement of media use taps into questions about A) the use of a particular device or technology (e.g. TV, Computer, MP3 Player), B) the type of media activity one is experiencing (e.g. watching video, playing games, emailing), C) the quality and type of content (e.g. educational narrative, game show, puzzle game) and D) context (e.g. who else is with you and where are you engaged in a particular activity). The surveys in the report we reviewed generally focused on A and B.

What was challenging in interpreting or capturing media time use in these studies was that in some cases the survey questions were organized around time spent with a particular technology or platform and in some cases the questions were organized around time spent engaged in a particular media activity and sometimes both. Currently, some particular technologies or platforms provide one basic activity and some provide an array of activities. And now, most activities can be done on a variety of technological platforms. The distinction between these two will continue to challenge researchers who want to capture both but do not want to have extremely long and convoluted questionnaires (e.g. how much time does your child spend in a given day reading books or magazines only on an eReader like on a Kindle or Nook but not in paper form book and not on the Internet?).

Even as we continue to see more and more media convergence, the distinction between the use of a particular technological device versus a particular activity that can be done across multiple devices will likely still be important because both may matter for different reasons. Certainly, we need to know about availability of technology in children’s homes and the kinds of technology children are particularly interested and engaged in if we are going to be creating educational interventions using these technologies. Perhaps a game on an iPad is inherently more interesting that than very same game on a website but before we argue for developing educational iPad apps, we need to have a better sense of actual home ownership and time use among children. The cost of various technologies might make some out of the reach for many, and a real understanding of what actually is available is still important until we have near universal ownership of each technology.

Activity is important because it provides a better foray into understanding the motivations behind media use. Knowing that a child uses the Internet mostly to Skype with a relative in another state versus using the Web to engage in solitary game play, gives us a much better sense of what a child is doing and may be getting from the experience than just knowing that he or she is using the Internet. Different activities may affect the degree to which children are emotionally, physically, cognitively and social influenced by the experience.

And of course, content and context are going to continue to be important as most research has found that such factors are strong drivers of media effects. The experience of playing a “shoot em up” game on a mobile device where the goal is to blow up as many enemies as possible while your older sibling is goading you on at the mall is going to have a different impact on you than a game on that same mobile device where the goal is to “blast” as many words as possible that begin have the same phoneme as a target word while you cuddle by your mother’s side on the couch. While both are mobile target practice games, the experiences of each are very different.

Marshall McLuhan’s well-known statement “the medium is the message” surely would allow for easier data collection. But unfortunately, the media and technology world has become a lot more complicated over the past 50 years allowing for a whole host of new experiences within each medium and across media. More and more content is available and mobile devices makes contexts of use even more varied. It’s going to be increasingly difficult to ask parents to estimate off the top of their head, as most phone surveys ask people to do, how much their child spends with particular media doing particular activities. What might be the solution?

Perhaps diary data will give us the most comprehensive way to capture use across all four factors. Asking parents to fill out daily logs about their children’s activities that include time and also ask for specifics surrounding the what media are being used, what they are being used for, with whom and under what conditions will allow us to have a much more complete look at media use. This would also allow us to cut the data in different ways so that we can get accurate time estimates by what we deem important.

The studies presented in Always Connected shed a great light on this explosion in media use but also illuminate the importance of asking the right questions so that we can adequately capture children’s full experience with all of these new technologies, activities, content and contexts.

Download the report.

Jennifer Kotler is the Assistant Vice President of Domestic Research at Sesame Workshop. She holds a Ph.D. in Child Development from the University of Texas at Austin.

Every February, children’s entertainment professionals from around the world converge in New York as the overlap of Toy Fair, Engage Expo and KidScreen Summit turn the city into a veritable stomping ground for those of us in the kids business. And every year, I can hardly wait to hear about the trends and see the products that will entertain children throughout the year ahead. This year did not disappoint!
Surprisingly, the product that most interested me this year came from toy giant Fisher Price, who unveiled the Laugh & Learn Baby iCan Play Case, a plastic case that protects any generation iPhone or iPod Touch from the poking, prodding and sticky fingers of young children. Coming out of a show filled with augmented realities and 3-D, this basic product may seem like a surprising pick as a standout. However, it’s less the product itself that is interesting, and more the commentary that it makes about the role that mobile devices are playing in kids culture today.

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