Technology has transformed many things.  Most things. I remember one of my amazing professors at the Harvard Ed School, the venerable Chris Dede, asking us to imagine walking into a number of different spaces.  Picture a movie theater.  A bank.  An airport.  A living room.  Can you tell whether you are in the past or present?  Probably.  Now, picture walking into a typical classroom.  If it weren’t for the clothes and hairstyles, in many cases you wouldn’t be able to tell if you were in the 21^st century.  While technology has certainly effected education, it hasn’t transformed it.  Well, a new Silicon Valley incubator is hoping to change that.

Imagine K12 helps startups in the education space “get it right and get it funded,” encouraging and enabling technological innovation in education. Based on the Y Combinator model of funding,they invest a small amount of money in a large number of startup companies twice a year. The entrepreneurs move to California for three months, during which they work intensively with the Imagine team and their network of experts who help turn their ideas into viable products and companies. Each cycle culminates in a Demo Day, where the startups present to an audience of investors.

Why do I think Imagine could really help startups succeed in an area that is notoriously difficult?  First of all, it was founded by a team of three successful entrepreneurs who are passionate about education and seasoned entrepreneurs.  Tim Brady was the first employee at Yahoo and VP of Product.  Alan Louie comes from Google, and held early roles at numerous successful startups including Netscape and Shutterfly.  Geoff Ralston was founder of 411.com (which became Yahoo Mail) and later CEO of Lala.  All three believe that our future depends on preparing our children for success in the 21st century, and are committed to doing everything they can to help make that happen.

Second, education is often the last to benefit from innovation because it is so hard to sell to. Imagine K12 is creating an ecosystem that will give new companies in the space every opportunity to succeed. Imagine is currently forging relationships with schools and platform providers to allow startups access to customer testing in real-life environments as well as ready-made distribution vehicles.

And finally, as founder Alan Louie has said, the time is right:  “We believe there is a perfect storm of factors making it the right time to launch our effort.  The technology is ready, the infrastructure has been built, there now exists a whole generation of teachers who have grown up with this technology, and the financial downturn has everyone looking to technology as a means to do more with less.”

So, if you want to start an educational startup, Imagine K12 is an amazing opportunity that will help you do well by doing good. And although schools are certainly a focus for the incubator, as long as your idea is educational it would apply as they are definitely open to direct-to-student solutions. I spoke with Alan about what kind of teams they hope will apply for the next round, and they’ve made it pretty easy: “We’d love to see entrepreneurs who can implement some of solutions listed at http://www.imaginek12.com/looking.html.”

Entrepreneurs who wish to apply may complete the application which is available on the Imagine K12 website. All applications must be complete and submitted by October 30, 2011.  Good luck!

Rebecca Herr Stephenson, Cooney Center fellow, has been in the New York office for a few days this week working with the Research team on the e-book QuickStudy out at the New York Hall of Science. We were thrilled that she brought a copy of her newly released book, Teaching Harry Potter: The Power of Imagination in Multicultural Classrooms, which she co-authored with Catherine L. Belcher.

The authors interview teachers who choose to teach Harry Potter in their classrooms and the often controversial and political decisions that they had to make in order to do so. They examine the cultural, economic, and educational power of J.K. Rowling’s pop-culture sensation, encouraging a critical discussion of the state of education and the policies that affect teachers’ freedom in the classroom.
The book was just released by Palgrave Macmillon earlier this month, and has received excellent reviews from luminaries such as Henry Jenkins, who notes that the book “produced powerful emotional responses” for him, including an even greater respect for the teachers who struggle to engage their students despite the obstacles that standardized curricula impose on their creativity as instructors.

Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website, and visit the Teaching Harry blog to learn more about the project. And watch for a more in-depth description of the project from Becky in the very near future!

On September 14, Michael Levine will participate in “Changing the Game: How Digital Games are Changing Entertainment and Education,” an academic panel at Becker College in conjunction with the inauguration of the college’s new president, Robert E. Johnson, Ph.D. The honorary chair and moderator is Gordon Bellamy, executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). Other panelists include Chad Dorsey, president and CEO, The Concord Consortium; Paul Cotnoir, PhD, professor and director, Becker College; Dave McCool, president and CEO, Muzzy Lane Software; Jon Radoff, CEO, Disruptor Beam; and Jeff Goodsill, VP/GM, Tencent Boston.

The panel will begin at 2:00 pm, followed by a ribbon-cutting ceremony to unveil the plans for the new Massachusetts Digital Games Institute. MassDIGI, to be housed at Becker College, will be a bridge between academia, the public sector, and the digital games industry to stimulate job growth and economic development throughout the state.

For more information on the panel and to register, please visit the Becker College website.

Research Assistant Meagan Bromley reflects on our most recent time in the field for the Cooney Center’s E-Book QuickStudy. Find out what our research team has been up to lately as well as how you can get involved in our upcoming follow-up study this week!

“Oh yes, I read Miss Spider on the iPad at home, and I play other games on it too.”

– 5-year-old boy on the “game” of reading

When Sesame Street first began, researchers were interested in ways of encouraging “coviewing” between children audiences and their parents. The belief was that if parents watched the show with their kids and interacted with the reading and counting activities on the screen, children would learn more from the show (and have more fun!). Now we live in a digital age where children and parents are in front of a variety of screens — televisions as well as home computers, smart phones, iPads, e-readers, and so on. And while adults and children still engage in activities like reading and counting on these devices, they interact with each other and with these media in all sorts of new ways.

In line with our previous research on coviewing and intergenerational play, the research team at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center wants to get a sense of how interactions between adults and children are taking place when reading electronic books, or e-books. How do adults and children read e-books compared to print books? Is someone more in charge on one format over another? Does one format encourage more conversation between adults and children? Which design features of e-books appear to support parent-child interaction? Do any features detract from these interactions?

Before embarking upon this research, we looked to the current research available on children reading with e-books. Most of the research we found was conducted on desktop computers (often with CD-ROM programs) with children using a mouse to read through a digital book. Although this will surely change as more recent studies make their way through the publishing cycle, we wanted to examine e-book use on the iPad, an increasingly popular platform among families with small children. E-book research up to now has also largely focused on reading with technology in school settings, rather than in the home amongst family members, so we hoped to address that gap as well.

And so the e-book QuickStudy was born. This summer, the Cooney Center kicked off what will be a series of “quick studies” which will look at children’s interactions with current digital media in an exploratory fashion in order to inform later, more full-scale studies as well as research and development directions for media producers. For our examination of e-books, we’ve been fortunate to partner with the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) in Queens, New York.

In June, we conducted an exploratory study at NYSCI’s Preschool Place with 24 pairs of adults (parents, grandparents and caregivers) and children (ages 3-5). In our process of choosing which e-books to use for this study (which gave a few of us on the team the opportunity to spend our work days playing on new apps with titles from Dr. Seuss and The Magic School Bus) we came to discover that there are really different standards developing in the levels of interactivity available among e-books. We began to refer to some as enhanced e-books — these are options with tons of bells and whistles like games, videos and interactive characters from the story embedded within a page. Alternatively, basic e-books are print books put into a digital format with minimal features like highlighting text and audio narration. We also found that the majority of e-books that came highly recommended by bloggers and iTunes popularity indexes were incredibly enhanced to the point of resembling interactive movies more than traditional reading experiences. After a long search, we were able to find two titles with science themes that are available in print, enhanced, and basic e-book formats.

Each pair read a print book followed by either an enhanced or basic e-book (and vice versa for half of the sample) while researchers videotaped their interactions and took observational notes. Following the co-reading task, researchers interviewed parents about their reading practices at home and elsewhere. And of course, we had plenty of Sesame Street stickers and coloring books to share with our new literary friends.

More details and results will become available later on this fall, but in the meantime, we’re preparing a second part to the study. Prior research suggest that drops in reading rates can be reversed by helping young readers incorporate reading into their social lives. For example, helping a child choose a book that he will enjoy may provide the motivation he needs to read more. So, for our E-book QuickStudy Part 2, we’ll be examining how parents and children choose books to read together. Parents, grandparents, and caregivers in the New York area who are interested in participating are invited to sign up online to participate in this study at the NY Hall of Science on Thursday, August 25 and Friday, August 26, 2011: http://svy.mk/quickstudy

This post originally appeared on the Education Nation Learning Curve Blog.

Last week, President Obama announced an innovation and competitiveness initiative designed to stimulate children’s interest in math and science careers. It was filled with solid ideas for engaging both struggling and advanced students in rigorous and relevant science and math study, but fell short in one arena that youth crave:  the use of digital technology.  In fact, a few weeks earlier the President asked parents to encourage kids to “turn off the video games and pick up a book.”   President Obama has a vital point—young people are consuming too much media these days, but in this instance he is missing something equally important.  Games, when well deployed, can be a powerful force for change in our nation’s education system.

The link between gaming and education is logical.  Today, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), 46 million kids between the ages of 5 – 17 are gamers. In addition, 50% of parents play video games with their kids, 84% of parents think video games are “fun for the entire family,” and 66% think video games “provide mental stimulation or education” and “bring families closer together.”

To fully engage and inspire children on subjects like math and science, educators and parents should be taking advantage of kids’ natural affinity for video games. Most experts agree that our learning approaches are stuck in a time warp, but they often disagree on solutions.  Games and mobile media offer a new place to find common ground.  While traditional forms of information – including books – are still vital tools, it is folly not to recognize that teaching techniques must meet kids where they are today.  Reading is rapidly moving to digital formats – tablets, smartphones, and laptops. In response, we must use the broad array of digital tools – including video games and interactive learning – as an “anytime, anywhere” platform for teaching and learning.

Foundational skills like literacy and numeracy, combined with new digital literacy skills that evolve from interactive play, are now using gaming technology to drive change intended to help close stubborn achievement gaps.   For example, curriculum-based  games and electronic books such as those created for Sesame Workshop’s Sesame Street and The Electric Company and PBS’ Ready to Learn initiative are teaching kids to read.

Quest to Learn, in New York City, is the nation’s first public school grounded in principles of game design. Chicago Quest, following the Quest to Learn model, will open in the fall of 2011. The premise behind these schools is simple: allow young people, through gaming and game design, to construct their own learning environments. They will, in turn, develop the essential skills necessary to cooperate and problem-solve in the 21st century economy.

Interestingly, one need look no further than the White House for further examples of gaming as an educational tool.  Last year, the Obama Administration launched a national effort to develop educational video games – The National STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) Video Game Challenge – in cooperation with the MacArthur Foundation, AMD Foundation, Microsoft, the Electronic Software Association, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, E Line Media, Brain Pop, the Boys and Girls Clubs, the American Library Association and others. The effort encourages youth, grad students and professional developers to create their own game-based solutions to teach essential knowledge and skills.  Effective new applications and games are emerging from this effort.

Video games can promote skills needed to effectively operate in a global economy – systems thinking, critical analysis, strategic planning, large scale collaboration and creativity. They can help address a key challenge confronting our current education system – a lack of student engagement.  These benefits are the reason why over 300 colleges and universities across the United States now offer video game design and development as part of their curriculum, and why the industry and nonprofit community are working to teach teachers how to integrate gaming into their standards-based instruction.  Foundations such as the Gates Foundation and the Knight Foundation are also digging more deeply into the market and research trends to drive 21^st Century Learning, including the creation of an inter-sector council intended to build the case for new investments in games and learning that the Cooney Center has convened.

The transition to a technology-rich education system that maps to the modern knowledge-based economy is happening. There is no putting the digital genie back into a bottle. It’s our job – from educators to game developers to the White House – to harness the creative potential of gaming to help schools excite a new generation of technologically-savvy learners. It is time to open a new chapter on video games.

The Philadelphia Action Team is comprised of a set of core partners, Philadelphia Academies Inc., the City of Philadelphia, the Urban Affairs Coalition, Philadelphia Youth Network, Drexel University, and the Knight Foundation.  We attended the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s 2011 Leadership Forum, “Learning From Hollywood: Can Entertainment Media Ignite a New Learning Revolution?” hosted by Sesame Workshop and University of Southern California.

Our Action Team has been working together since January to build the Digital On-Ramps Project, a four-year initiative that envisions a practical solution to one of Philadelphia’s most formidable challenges: preparing all Philadelphians to work and compete in the 21st century economy. (Learn more about the Digital On-Ramps Project: download a PDF.) This initiative will provide a digital framework for delivering comprehensive education and workforce training to youth and adults. Accessible via the “cloud” from a full range of devices (mobile, tablets, netbooks, desktop computers, etc.), it will offer an array of educational and training tools from basic literacy and math to post-secondary education and employment training. To reach people in ways they’ll be most likely to learn, the material will engage students through interactive technologies such as gaming and SMS-texts.

Digital On-Ramps, still in its discovery/research/planning phase, received a tremendous boost through our attendance of Cooney Leadership Forum. In the weeks preceding the Forum, our team had identified a number of questions to be answered during the early part of our discovery and research portion of the project.  A fair number of these questions related to technology, strategies, and practices to be employed at a citywide scale.  We were at the real limit of our knowledge from direct experience and needed to be in touch with others who were exploring these questions to broaden our view and advance our thinking in practical and theoretical ways.

Knowing this, Donna Frisby-Greenwood, the Knight Foundation’s Philadelphia Program Officer and a member of our Action Team, invited us to attend the Cooney Forum. She must have had a strong sense of possibility with respect to our attendance and what it could provide in terms of a network of peers, connections to interested collaborators, and food for thought.

The Cooney Forum turned out to be an exceptional experience for our group.  At the Forum, we came in to contact with our fellow Action Teams, researchers, practitioners, leaders from industry, non-profits government, philanthropy, and others.  It was exactly what we needed.  We met people working on projects with direct relevance to the Digital On-Ramps and/or with knowledge that could assist us.

In particular, our Action Team members were impressed with:

• The use of arts as a medium for teaching core subject areas, not just as a strategy for empowering youth, including movie-making, game design, plays and more.
• The fact that the Creative Industry was so genuinely at the table and interested in leveraging their media assets, talents, knowledge and expertise to advance education and to build a solid foundation for the future.
• The ways that technology (mobile, tablets, digital media, etc.) is being harnessed inside and outside of the classroom to teach 21st century skills.
• The caliber and diversity of the network convened, including peers from other cities that have significant experience and robust collaborations for our Action Team to learn from.

Coming away from the Forum, we noticed that there was something very special about the network it convened.  First, the intellectual chemistry at the event was remarkable. Second, the Forum put us in touch with other Action Teams, in particular, New York, Chicago, and Pittsburgh, who have tackled many of the problems that we are looking to address. Third, our group was exposed to significant leaders from industry and academia that could inform our perspective from their respective fields. Finally, the groundwork for a real community of practice was present, which is especially important for the Digital On-Ramps project since it is a fundamentally new approach in Philly’s workforce and education arenas.

Having the community that is forming around the nexus of the Cooney Forum has already grounded and advanced our work, acting as the community of practice that we very much needed. In addition, a number of natural partnerships emerged with academic institutions, industry, content partners and others.

The experience overall was amazing.  The connections that we made will inform our work deeply. Most importantly, the community that we joined will help the Philadelphia Action Team reach our goals and fulfill our vision to prepare Philadelphia for the 21st Century by building Digital On-Ramps.

Arun Prabhakaran is Manager of Government and Strategic Partnerships at the Urban Affairs Coalition (UAC), which works to improve life’s chances for young people, low-income families and minority-owned businesses by creating economic opportunities and strengthening nonprofit organizations in urban communities.

As I finish up my last week at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, I cannot help but reflect on my experiences as an intern over the last few months.  When I came into the office on the first day I didn’t know what to expect, or even what type of work I would be given. My supervisor, Catherine Jhee, who was helpful as always, showed me to my desk and got me started on website work.  She put me in charge of adding events and news highlights as well as making sure that there wasn’t any spam posted on the website. To be honest, we do have a bit of a spam problem! I was also given the job of updating the database with new contacts, which was not so fun, but extremely important.

After about two weeks of work, I was invited to go with Dr. Michael Levine to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles, CA.  It was an unbelievable opportunity for me, and definitely a great introduction to the field of games and new media. When I returned to the Cooney Center, I was asked to write a blog post about my experiences. This was very exciting, because not only do I love to write, but it was also my first official blog post.

A few more weeks went by; I was mostly doing website and database work, but also had been given the opportunity to critique our website and make suggestions to improve it. Then, in the beginning of July, I was invited to participate in an E-book research study that the Cooney Center was conducting at the Hall of Science in Queens, NY. It was my first early childhood research experience and it was really fascinating to observe and be a part of. I had previously done research in a lab at Mount Sinai, but interacting with mice doesn’t compare to interacting with young children!

The next week, I had a discussion with Carly Shuler, a senior consultant at the Cooney Center, about updating the iLearn study. The Cooney Center first published the iLearn study two years ago, as a content analysis of the top 100 apps in the education section of the iTunes app store. The update seemed necessary because two years ago, apps were only made for the iPhone. In fact, it seems likely that with the introduction of the iPad less than a year and a half ago, apps are now being tailored to a much different crowd.

It was my goal to find out whether that was the case. Just as with the 2009 study, we were very interested in seeing the subjects, prices, and recommended ages of the top 100 educational apps. However, this time we coded for the top 100 apps on both the iPad and iPhone. We also decided to code for apps that advertise parent-child interaction, though I am unsure about whether there will be significant results. At this point, I have finished my part of the coding, but for more reliable data, a few others are being asked to code as well. I will be off to Madison when this occurs, but I look forward to seeing the final results.

I definitely learned many important skills as an intern at the Cooney Center and was given the opportunity to get a taste of everything; whether it was going to conferences like Games for Change and E3, doing website and database work, or even writing blog posts. But, I also feel that I discovered something that is equally important, though much more subtle-to understand what you truly enjoy doing, you have to try things, and that is what I find to be really important, especially as a college kid, trying to find a niche in a world full of opportunity.

It has been a wonderful experience and I cannot thank the Cooney Center staff enough for their guidance and support.

Zachary Levine was an intern with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center this summer. He is a rising sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is studying international relations. We thank Zach for all of his contributions to the Cooney Center this summer and wish him the best as he heads back to Madison this fall.

What do you get when you cross a pony with a unicorn?  According to 5 year-old Cassie Creighton, you get a ponycorn.  According to renowned game blog Kotaku.com, you get what may just be “the most adorable video game ever created.”  According to me, you get an intergenerational father-daughter experience around media creation that is as magical as the ponycorns themselves.

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is a video game created by Cassie and her dad Ryan, founder of Toronto’s Untold Entertainment.  The game — written, illustrated and voiced by Cassie – has become somewhat of a phenomenon, receiving national TV coverage, press in papers such as The Toronto Star and The National Post, and buzz from a plethora of websites and blogs ranging from The Huffington Post to Wired UK.

The point-and-click web game follows a little girl named Sissy on her quest to collect five magical ponycorns and put them in jars. Take 10 minutes today and play this game.  Do it now.  Finish it.  And trust me, if it doesn’t bring a smile to your face you may just be more evil than a lemon (best line of the game: “That’s what you get for being evil AND a lemon“)!

The game was developed as part of the Toronto Independent Game Development Jam, an annual three-day gathering where Toronto’s indie games scene gets together to produce something new.  Ryan and Cassie were one of 80 teams who met their goal of “finishing a good, small game in 3 days.”   In his blog, dad Ryan talks about the resistance he faced around bringing a child to the event.  A lot of people were nervous that 5-year old Cassie would be disruptive — especially himself!  But he took her anyway, motivated by the desire to spend time with his daughter and at the same time give her some tech training in a fun way.  Clearly the results were positive for all involved.

Here at the Cooney Center, we talk a lot about the importance of intergenerational interaction and joint media engagement to promote children’s healthy development and learning.  We also talk about the great learning that can happen when children create their own games and other forms of media.  That’s why I love this story of Cassie, her dad Ryan, and their magical ponycorns — it combines the benefits of intergenerational play and media creation.

While the Creightons are obviously at an advantage because of Ryan’s technical expertise, you don’t have to be a developer to engage in game creation with your children.  Starting as babies, we all create games within the structures of our own families.  I have a 14-month-old, and the current game in our household consists of us all joining hands at the dinner table — only when everyone is holding hands do we sing.  If someone drops his or her hand the singing stops (my husband will be thrilled that I am sharing this story).  My daughter finds this game absolutely hysterical.  She understands the rules and anticipates the rewards.  While the games we create can vary from the simple to the complex, we can all probably think of games invented within our own family structures.  I use the story of Cassie and her dad as a challenge to think about how we can use today’s digital media tools to compliment this family play pattern of game creation.

So what do you get when you cross a pony with a unicorn?  A magical ponycorn.  A wonderful game.  Hilarious insight into the logic of a five year old.  And an intergenerational media creation experience between a father and daughter that will last a lifetime.