This op-ed was originally published in the Boston Globe’s “The Podium” on September 25, 2011.

 

For decades, America’s educational leadership has been the envy of the world. But now, in the face of globalization and economic realignment, adaptation and innovation are urgently needed.

Retooling our education engine to produce better outcomes will drive our ability to compete in a complex, networked world powered by technology and efficiency. Transitioning to the digital age will define our children’s future career prospects in the knowledge-based economy of 21st century.

That transition is well underway, as evidenced by the growing ubiquity of new technologies, like digital games, once confined to home and peer play, that are appearing in curricula, from kindergartens to college courses.

Today’s digital games industry is best known as a $55 billion worldwide video game entertainment behemoth that conjures images of mayhem and adolescent bonding. But digital games have emerged as much more than that. Driven by their highly visual and engaging nature, games are now found everywhere from medical and military simulations, to publishing and advertising, to corporate training and healthcare.

Foundational literacy skills such as reading, united with new digital literacy skills that evolve from interactive play, must now drive educational change. According to industry marketing reports, some 50 million kids between the ages of 5-17 regularly play games, and the reach of games has gone beyond the stereotypical male tech geek.

The Entertainment Software Association reports that 72 percent of households play games on tablets, smartphones, laptops, consoles and other devices. Furthermore, 50 percent of parents play digital games with their kids, 84 percent of parents think the games are “fun for the entire family,” and 66 percent think games “provide mental stimulation.

This past spring, President Obama visited Tech Boston Academy in Dorchester, and called for “investments in educational technology that will help create digital tutors that are as effective as personal tutors, educational software as compelling as the best video game.”

A growing number of promising initiatives are doing just that. The National STEM Video Game Challenge, developed by The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media, encourages youth, graduate students and professional developers to create their own game-based solutions to teach essential knowledge and skills. Effective new applications and games have emerged as a result, including the game “Prankster Planet,” created for Sesame Workshop’s The Electric Company.

Building upon the insights of creative designers paired with child development experts, entire schools have been founded on the concept of game-based learning. Quest to Learn, in New York City, is the country’s first public school grounded in principles of game design. A second, Chicago Quest will open this September.

The premise behind these schools is simple: let young people, via game design principles, build their own learning environments, which then will teach them how to develop the skills needed to thrive and compete in the global economy.

The Commonwealth is home to a healthy digital games cluster, and companies like Muzzy Lane Software are leading the way in creating fun game-based learning products. Their well-known “Making History” series allows players to immerse themselves in World War II. “Past/Present“, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, has players experience life in a mill city during the industrial revolution.

Area universities and non-profits are hard at it as well. The Concord Consortium, a nonprofit dedicated to igniting large-scale improvements in teaching and learning through technology, produced the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education award-winning “Molecular Workbench” with support from the National Science Foundation. The Education Arcade at MIT explores games that promote learning through authentic and engaging play, like “Caduceus,” a game kids can play at Generation Cures for Children’s Hospital Boston.

Last April, the Patrick administration created the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute, based at Becker College in Worcester. The institute’s mission is to prompt even greater collaboration among the digital games industry, the public sector and academia to strategically foster job growth and economic development in the Commonwealth.

Digital game technologies offer enormous potential to help unleash untapped skills, knowledge and perspectives needed for our future leaders to compete and cooperate in a flat world economy. There is no doubt that America has the people, resources, and ideas to level up: it just needs to get in the game!

 

 

Michael H. Levine is executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop in New York, Timothy Loew is executive director of the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute in Worcester.

Yes, this is another piece about the SpongeBob study. I wanted to provide my thoughts on it both from a scientific research perspective, but also as someone who has to help make production decisions even when there is not enough time and resources to do a thorough scientific study. Often we have to hypothesize about why particular content supports or detracts from children’s learning.

 

For the 2% of you (completely unscientific poll) who might be reading this but who have not read the study conducted by University of Virginia researchers and published in Pediatrics, here’s a brief description.  In the study, the researchers assigned 4-year-olds to one of three conditions for 9 minutes: 1) watching SpongeBob (fast paced animation), 2) watching Calliou (slower paced animation), or 3) drawing. The kids were then tested on a variety of tasks that measure executive functioning (e.g. paying attention, delay of gratification, task persistence). The researchers found that children who watched the 9 minutes of SpongeBob had lower scores on the executive functioning tasks. The larger takeaway in the media has been that fast paced animation like that of SpongeBob may interfere with executive functioning skills.  Many people from both the research as well as the television world have commented on the limitations of the study (all studies have some!) as well as the more global statements about the causal explanations of the findings.  David Kleeman of the American Center for Children and Media provides a summary in the Huffington Post about the concerns of the study.

I would like to focus on the point David Kleeman raises about the fact that the shows differ on so many different variables beyond the pace of the animation. To add to that, I also think using one comparison (SpongeBob versus Calliou) is also risky in making assumptions about the cause of any difference. Perhaps I am envious that this particular study got so much attention, for when I attempted to publish my master’s thesis, I was told of several limitations that prevented it from being published. My study was one of Schoolhouse Rock. I examined whether children learned audio and visual information better in song or prose form keeping the visuals of the video the same. I used “Interplanet Janet” and created a professional spoken word version where the lyrics were mostly the same, except the sentences were changed a bit so that there was no rhyming. When I attempted to publish it, I was told by reviewers of several different social science journals that I only had one comparison and that I would need to replicate the findings with perhaps two other songs (and prose versions). Furthermore, I it was suggested that I should experimentally isolate what component of the song — was it the rhyme?  the rhythm? or the music? —  that would account for any differences in recall.  Given that there are so many differences between SpongeBob and Calliou, it’s difficult to state with certainty (however logical it may be) that the pace was the cause of the effects.  It could be that high exposure to the color YELLOW is associated with lower executive functioning for all we know!

At Sesame Workshop, we often have to make judgment calls about the reason certain clips, games, and apps work over others. To the extent that we can manipulate only one variable while keeping others constant, we do. For example, we once tested children’s appeal and comprehension of Ernie and Bert in puppet version and then the very same clip (with almost identical dialogue) in claymation. Another time, we measured children’s attention to a full Sesame Street hour in school settings and then in home settings to see whether our in-school methods of testing reveal similar findings to home viewing. And one time there was a question as to whether children would be more responsive to an actual button on screen or to an “imaginary” button: we created two videos, changing only the presence or absence of a button and the language referring to it.  In each of these cases, we tried to only manipulate one variable and even then, we felt we wanted to use more examples before making conclusive statements about why we found what we did.

And sometimes we do have to make judgments about why certain designs or content works and others do not, in the absence of good experimental designs. But we constantly test our hypotheses and build on the learning from one test to another. If we notice that something isn’t working in one particular case, our recommendations are to change that specific instance. We then put that piece of evidence along with other instances where we may or have found the same thing before attributing a WHY to that finding.  Since Sesame Workshop has been collecting this kind of information for over 40 years, we have many examples to draw from and make predictions, recommendations, and conclusions.

While the SpongeBob case may have ruffled many feathers and caused a media frenzy, studies like it are important for the dialogue it creates among scientists, as well as for the interest it creates among mass audiences. But we have to urge journal editors, those who submit publications, and the press to temper the language they use around global explanations until they have enough scientific evidence on to support a claim. Until then, I’m staying away from the color yellow before I have to do anything that requires my full attention.

 

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

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Image of SpongeBob from spongebob.nick.com.

 

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media were at the White House today, where  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the launch of the new Digital Promise Initiative.

First established as a non-profit organization created by the President and. Congress through the Department of Education as an effort to promote breakthrough technologies  to transform teaching and learning. The 2011 National STEM Video Game Challenge is one of the new initiatives that the Administration hopes will spur research and development and private-sector investment in learning technologies.

 

The Cooney Center and E-Line Media announced the sponsors and partners that have joined forces to make the second annual STEM Challenge Video Game Challenge possible. The 2012 Challenge will build on the success of the first year by re-uniting the original Challenge sponsors: the AMD Foundation, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the Entertainment Software Association, and will add the Corporation for Public Broadcasting PBS KIDS Ready To Learn initiative as a new sponsor.

This year’s challenge will also reunite the original founding outreach partners: the American Library Association, American Association of School Librarians, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, International Game Developers Association and BrainPOP and will add the George Lucas Educational Foundation, Girl Scouts of the USA and One Economy as new Outreach Partners.  Together, these partners reach over 10 million young people, many of whom have had inadequate exposure to engaging STEM initiatives and 21st century skills that are so vital in a rapidly changing digital age.

The Cooney Center and E-Line Media will announce the prize categories, jury and rules of the 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge when the competition launches this November. The 2012 will feature four entry categories; Middle School, High School, Collegiate and Educator.

 

Learn more about the 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge at stemchallenge.org.

Read the press release.

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) has just published a policy brief authored by Michael Levine, the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and James Paul Gee, the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University. Reed an excerpt of the brief below and download the full PDF here.

 

Almost 30 years after the landmark study A Nation at Risk, and the subsequent hundreds of billions spent trying to ramp-up children’s mastery of basic skills through Head Start, Title 1 and No Child Left Behind, American school performance is stuck in wet cement. In the United States today, the majority of low-income children and a shocking one-third of their more affluent peers are behind when it comes to one key predictor of future achievement: fourth grade reading. Only 14 percent of African-American and 17 percent of Hispanic children are deemed “proficient” readers in fourth grade as judged by the National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.

Why is fourth grade so important? Because if children are not well on their way toward being confident readers by the age of 10, they will fall progressively behind in learning complex academic content. Researchers have found a nearly 80 percent correlation between being two years behind in reading at the 4th grade mark and dropping out of high school later.

But instead of meeting these pressing needs with modern approaches and new technologies, national education policy has unintentionally turned many of our schools into test-prep academies focused on standardized skill sets in a world that demands higher-level critical thinking. Policymakers also have ignored the central modernizing force of the 21st century—the creative media tools that have transformed nearly every element of life today except schools. In this policy brief, we suggest a new way to get over the early learning hump: Create a Digital Teacher Corps to unleash the untapped power of digital media to boost literacy among our most vulnerable children.

The model for this proposal is Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit civic enterprise that also receives some public funding from the Corporation for National and Community Service. We challenge U.S. foundations to create a competition for the best design for a non-profit organization focused on a specific goal: Ensure that 80 percent of all 10-year-olds are competent readers by 2020. The winning design would receive seed money to launch the Digital Teacher Corps, which would recruit and dispatch digitally proficient teachers into low-income school districts where they are most needed.

Read the entire policy brief.

This interview with Michael Levine originally appeared in Literacy 2.0 in August, 2011. It appears here with the permission of the author, Robert L. Lindstrom.

 

In 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced, the venerable children’s TV programmer Children’s Television Workshop (now named Sesame Workshop) spun off a nonprofit research and production institute intended to do for digital media what Sesame Street did for television, namely make the medium both educational and entertaining at the same time. The center was named after Joan Ganz Cooney, the Children’s Television Workshop producer whose vision of what TV could do to help kids learn the three Rs ushered in the Big Bird era.

The mission of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is to undertake research projects and develop programs that advance our understanding of how computer and Internet games, smartphones and other digital devices can be adapted as learning tools.

The center was set up with its own foundation and funding sources and Dr. Michael Levine was hired as executive director. Levine is an early childhood education research and policy expert who, prior to joining the Cooney Center, served as vice president of new media and executive director of education for Asia Society.

Previously, Levine oversaw the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s work in early childhood development, educational media and primary grades reform. He was a senior advisor to the New York City Schools Chancellor, where he directed dropout prevention, afterschool and early childhood initiatives. He is currently a senior associate at the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University.

Much of the work of the Cooney Center focuses on the question posed by Levine during a presentation he delivered at the TED conference: “Can the media multitasking generation adopt a new set of ‘habits of mind’ that will allow them to learn in totally new ways?” Literacy 2.0 spoke with Dr. Levine about that and about the corollary question: Can the existing education system, administrators, teachers and infrastructure adapt quickly enough to allow new, digitally enabled ways of learning to happen?

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What was the technology and learning environment like when the Cooney Center first opened its doors?

When we started, the digital innovation that was entering children’s lives felt like the age of the Jetsons. But when it came to what we knew about the impact that these digital innovations or technologies were having on children’s hearts, minds and bodies, it was more like the age of the Flintstones.

A lot has happened in digital tech since the center was founded. How do things look to you now?

Four years later, the flux and dynamics caused by the digital media revolution remain exciting, but are also roiling family life in all sorts of ways. And the instigation and disruption of digital media on the places in which children learn is definitely changing more rapidly.

Have you been surprised by the speed of innovation and adoption?

At the beginning we never imagined smartphones would have the impact they have had, and tablets were not even on the radar. Four years ago, particularly among the educators of young children, the notion that mobile digital media technology would be a means for promoting childhood learning and health awareness would have been sniffed at. Back then the discussions were all about the $100 laptop.

How are the digital devices for communication and gaming changing how kids learn?

The new tools are changing the way in which we think about learning theory. Also, the numbers of new young developers have knocked down a lot of the cost barriers to developing stuff. Everybody is a producer. Everybody has to be a producer, including the kids. That’s part of the message now.

Are we making progress with adapting digital tools to learning, the way Sesame Street adapted television?

Things have really changed in terms of our expectations of technology around learning. But they have not changed nearly fast enough in terms of that moat that continues to exist between the informal learning that goes on in the home and community, where children are directed by their passions, and the formal learning and expectations in the schools.

You said in an article in The Huffington Post that “The transition to a digital age that aligns with the 21^st century knowledge-based economy defines our children’s future job prospects. But our learning approaches are stuck in a time warp.” How stuck are we?

We are still stuck in thinking about rows and columns and teachers as sages on the stage. The factory model still exists. The extended learning concept in which school is an important equity driver, but is an extender of learning for children, is not yet fully accepted.

In addition, the test culture around competitiveness is driving incentives for good teachers sometimes to avoid 21^st century learning.

You are referring to programs like “No Child Left Behind.”

I am not necessarily a critic of “No Child Left Behind.” I think there was a lot good about that legislation in terms of measuring everyone’s progress that wasn’t going on before, but the instruments have been blunt instruments and need to improve.

Are you opposed to national standards?

I think common core standards could be a leap forward if they deepen what’s expected of children away from the current test-prep culture that is focusing on too-narrow skills.

I feel like the education reform discussion in our country is stuck, but I feel like there are a lot of good things to build off of if we would look at technology as a disruptive force that would allow us to shake loose from those parts of the systemic education reform wave that have not worked.

Disruptive forces such as?

Personalization is clearly a big issue. Globalization is clearly a big issue in terms of what our children know and don’t know about the world. And digitization is clearly a huge force in modernizing schoolhouses and other learning environments from the ground up.

If the delivery of education changes to be much more collaborative and personal, it will allow digital media to be the imagination stimulant that it can be.

Then we need a complete shift away from the factory model of education?

The factory model has been functional for some people over the years. Maybe 70%. But we can’t compete and cooperate without 100% functionality, and that is going to require a new model.

We need to look at the education process with fresh eyes. One of the real big issues is the falseness of the productivity gains that a lot of the policymakers are looking for. My worry with the way that systemic education reform has gone is that it is going to succeed 20 years after we needed it to. In other words, we will get everybody up to a level of skill that is now becoming a ceiling but should have been a floor.

Do you think we can avoid creating a ceiling out of the floor, as you say?

There is a lot of wishful thinking going around in education right now, coupled with resistance to the modernization of the school. I am hopeful that the framework of deeper-and-personal is going to help us avoid the precipice.

How does digital technology play into the framework of deeper-and-personal?

A lot of it has to do with the way in which the whole conversation has been framed by child advocates and educators. People see technology in the body politic and the body public as important in terms of productivity, at the same time they see it as edging people out of jobs. They see it as very commercial and think the new tools are for fun. Parents view technologies through the default of threats like cyberbullying and video game addiction.

We have got to figure out a different frame for the public conversation. That’s what I am hoping we can do more of at the Cooney Center.

What are some of the parameters of that framework?

When we started four years ago we were in the business to think about the Digital Era equivalent of Sesame Street: What would it take to advance children’s learning in a digital age? Four years later, we are still very interested in that, but now we are fascinated by the impact of smaller organizations like ours and the participatory culture that youth are bringing to the table.

Kids will be helping to change the framework?

Without a doubt. Technology has become part of every kid’s costume. It’s their clothing now. It’s an old story: It’s going to be the older Luddites losing out to the younger innovators.

So, you see the forces of change in education coming from the technology-enabled youth culture as opposed to a systems-design approach?

I do. I think there is a grass roots movement underway that will change the way in which education is delivered in this country, and technology will be one of the really important factors.

How do you rate government’s efforts to integrate technology and reform the system?

The Obama administration gets what’s going on. It’s a creative, smart group. They have their national technology plan, a chief technology officer. A lot of people in Washington are talking up technology and education. There is a recognition factor there, but whether it has a high enough priority, I don’t know. There are a lot of competing issues.

What about state and local efforts?

I see a lot of interesting, good stuff being tried. Florida’s e-learning effort is a good example. But the political and funding environment has been tough for innovation. It’s been a pretty difficult time for initiating reforms. I mean, how do you think about making teachers more digitally literate and more productive when you are busy laying them off?

Are there things we can do even in the face of meager resources and mindshare constraints?

We can be a lot more efficient in terms of both parent engagement and the money that is spent on reporting and compliance.

You frequently mention digital games and game-building as disruptive technologies that could change the face of education.

I think the driver for educational change has to be literacy skills like reading and writing combined with new digital literacy skills that evolve from interactive play. I’m talking about video games that embed research and educational curriculum. Research has already shown the value in terms of spatial skills, systems thinking and collaboration skills. Not coincidentally, those attributes have been identified by employers as key 21^st century employment skills.

How is the Cooney Center addressing that opportunity?

Along with E-Line Media and with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation we have just launched the Games and Learning Publishing Council. The purpose of the council is to understand the marketplace, to understand the supply and demand factors. The council is going to take a look at the incentives and disincentives in the marketplace for there to be more educationally robust educational games.

You say games can bridge the gap between home (informal) and school (formal) learning. Is that bridge under construction?

We are beginning to see some closing of the gap with things like the Quest to Learn schools in New York and Chicago. Digital technology is becoming an important theme within some new charter schools. And we are seeing robust, successful models like High Tech High in San Diego. You are seeing more and more of these models and people are starting to pay attention to them. And you are seeing publishers begin to embed games, for better or worse, within educational curriculum.

As you see it, what is the primary challenge to bringing games and gaming into the education process?

The big open question is how to link between what the kids are passionate about outside school and what is going on inside. That’s where the most work still needs to be done.

What about commercial digital games companies? Are they doing their share?

There is some leadership in trade associations that are trying very hard to get the companies to be responsible in terms of education and health. They have had education and health summits. But there are a lot of companies that don’t see a marketplace yet. They are making profits with the shoot ‘em ups. I am not against that stuff. But given the educational power of video games, they are not yet well deployed for intentional educational learning.

And then there is the next level, where kids go from playing learning games to actually designing and building games, which you described in your keynote address to the E-Tech Caucus as allowing “young people, through game design principles, to construct their own learning environments, which in turn will teach them how to develop the essential skills necessary to compete and thrive in the 21st century economy.”

The center is very excited about the potential of kids to transform the educational system by constructing their own learning environments. We are trying to do our own little part by doing things like the National STEM Video Game Challenge. [The annual competition sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association, Microsoft and The AMD Foundation in partnership with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media.]

We are trying to give the kids the tools to express their creativity and learning impulses.

The medium is the schoolroom?

Yes. We think kids are going to make an extremely important move here.

Are the teachers ready for that?

Obviously teachers need to be trained in the use of digital learning as part of their professional development and teacher education. Teachers can’t teach what they don’t know. Many of them are not really skilled in thinking about the unique affordances of digital technologies. The students are in many cases ahead of the teachers, but the teachers are ready to learn.

To give you some idea of what’s happening, when we did a survey of 800 parents of children ages 3-10, more than a third of the parents reported that they had learned something technical from their kids.

“There was a lot of emotion around 9/11, but of course there was no clear path on what to do with this.  But we had this show, this incredible entryway into homes that had credibility amongst parents and children.  How could we best use it?”

-Dr. Lewis Bernstein, Executive Vice President of Education and Research at Sesame Workshop

 

With the 10th anniversary of September 11th this past weekend, many of us have been reflecting on what we were doing that fateful day. On the morning of the attacks, producers of Sesame Street were driving into the Queens-based studios to shoot episodes for the 33rd season, and like many others, they saw the plumes of smoke billowing over lower Manhattan.  I recently had the opportunity to talk to one of the long-standing guiding forces behind Sesame Street — as well as a personal mentor of mine — Dr. Lewis Bernstein, about how the iconic children’s show responded to the attacks of September 11.

 

Sesame Workshop has a tradition of addressing emotionally difficult topics, but 9/11 was clearly unprecedented and shocking.  One may think it would have been a difficult decision, deciding whether or not to address the attacks with their young audience, but for the Sesame Street team the question was not if, but how:  “We were in production at the time of the 9/11 attacks, and most of us were driving to the studios over either the Triborough or 59th Street Bridge,” Dr. Bernstein said. “We saw the cloud of grey smoke.  I think it was immediately pretty clear to all of us that we would try to deal with it in some way, knowing full well that whatever we would tape would take time to get on the air.”

At the time of the attacks, most of the shows for the upcoming season were already written, but four were not.  Dr. Bernstein and his colleagues decided that they would devote the four remaining episodes to addressing 9/11, because “children were not oblivious to what had happened.  We needed to find a legitimate way to deal with it.”  The question then became the daunting task of how to address the horrors of 9/11 with a 3-year-old.  The team called a meeting with outside advisors to establish how to proceed.  The varied group of experts, including child psychologists and specialists in emergency response, decided that they would split the four remaining shows between two major issues associated with 9/11: fear and intolerance.

The first episode of the new season following 9/11 confronted fear directly through a fire in Mr. Hooper’s store (see a clip here).  It was a powerful episode, because Elmo was in the store when the fire broke out.  The firefighters saved the store, but Elmo was still frightened.  He was shaken by the fire, and scared of the firefighters themselves.  Seeing this, the firefighters invited Elmo to visit their station — a real New York firehouse that lost firefighters on 9/11.  Elmo learned all about firefighters and the brave purpose they serve.  “We wanted to teach kids that it is ok to be scared, but that there are adults who are trying to protect you and take care of you.  We also wanted to tip our hats to the firefighters of New York.”

We are so used to the characters on Sesame Street living together with tolerance and respect. This expectation was tested in one of the episodes addressing intolerance, when Big Bird was visited by his pen pal — a seagull named Gulliver who lived afar.  When Gulliver arrived on Sesame Street, Snuffy wanted to play with him.  But Gulliver tells Big Bird and Snuffy that he only plays with birds.  Snuffy, of course, is not a bird. “This whole segment drove towards one key line from Big Bird, which was: ‘If you can’t play with Snuffy, I won’t play with you,'” Dr. Bernstein said. “It was a line that we really wanted to drive home, because it addressed the idea of standing up to intolerance. Even as a preschooler you can take a stand about what’s fair.”

The Workshop didn’t stop at the television episodes.  As Dr. Bernstein explained, “We noticed that the children who lived proximate to the disaster were having a great deal of fear – and not all of these children spoke English.  It was Chinese Americans, it was Hispanic Americans, so we decided to take these shows and create an outreach kit.”  The Workshop therefore put together an outreach kit called ‘You Can Ask,‘ which focused on fear and grief in children under five. The kits, available in English, Spanish and Chinese, were distributed via the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to childcare facilities and mental health care programs nationwide.

As with all media that The Workshop creates, the episodes and outreach materials were rigorously tested with children and parents.  “When we tested the materials, we found that children who reviewed them were more willing to talk about it, they were less afraid of going to bed at night.  This whole process from design to formative research was enough to give us a sense that this was a powerful thing”.

Obviously, the world continued to be affected by 9/11, and that included Sesame Street. “The next season, in addition to literacy and numeracy, we wanted to talk about being socially aware.  So we created Global Grover and included footage of children from around the world, showing kids that we are all interconnected.”

So here we are, 10 years later.  When it comes to children’s media, the landscape has shifted dramatically, presenting both challenges and opportunities.  On one hand, it has become substantially more difficult to shield children from scary and inappropriate images.  On the other hand, new technologies present novel ways to disseminate helpful tools and information.  The Workshop has been able to capitalize on new and emerging technologies to deal with difficult topics. “With technological evolution, we are able to reach many more children than we could before.  For instance, we were able to take our ‘You Can Ask’ outreach kits and create podcasts out of them that could be downloaded anywhere, anytime by kids in need.”

As a final question, I asked Dr. Bernstein if he had any words of inspiration, motivation, or advice for developers of children’s media in terms of addressing difficult topics:  “One of the things that we’ve learned over the years here at Sesame Street is that simple is powerful. Things don’t have to be complicated.  So think about those educational issues that the nation needs — and there are so many of them — and try to address them with integrity and with the guidance of people who know something about them.  Once you do that you’re on your way.  If you properly integrate education and entertainment, you will find both a market, and hopefully if you do it well, have successful impact.”