I wasn’t going to blog about the American Academy of Pediatrics recent update to its 1999 policy statement, which discouraged media use for children under the age of 2.  Why not?  Because numerous experts much more knowledgeable than I already provided excellent commentary on the report.  Both Warren Buckleitner and David Kleeman effectively summarized the statement’s inadequacies.  Moms with Apps did a nice job interpreting the report into usable tips for parents.   And Sesame Workshop’s Jennifer Kotler and Rosemarie Truglio discussed how more research is needed to assess the impact and potential of media on parents and children in today’s complex media landscape. I felt that the AAP’s updated statement was … well … not really updated.  I didn’t have much to add.

But in two weeks since the statement was released, I’ve gotten numerous questions on my thoughts about the guidelines.  Not so much from industry colleagues, but from fellow parents — friends, family, moms at playgroup — concerned that they are not abiding by the recommendation to keep their young children’s lives as “screen-free” as possible.  I hear the panic in their voices as they ask me if my daughter, old enough that she doesn’t shove the iPad in her mouth but still under the golden age of two, lives a “screen-free” life.  I hear their relief when I assure them that she doesn’t.

While my blogs always come about as combination of my roles as a mom and as someone who works in children’s media, they usually have a professional focus.  I tend to keep my personal experiences out of it — mainly because our primary audience is industry, but also because my daughter is only now starting to consume media.  But this time, it felt more relevant and it felt more personal.  So with a big “I’m-not-a-doctor” caveat, here is a story that highlights why I feel the statement falls short.

I was excited to get to work on October 18th.  The industry had been anticipating the AAP’s update to its policy on young children and media, and many had speculated that they would be modifying their recommendation to limit screens with the under-twos.  But when I got to my email and saw the release courtesy of Scott Traylor, I didn’t open it.  I got distracted by an email from What to Expect, my daily newsfeed on all things parenting.  The title of the day’s email: “Does Your Child Need a Multivitamin?”

Gasp.  My pulse quickened.  My daughter doesn’t take a multivitamin.  It’s never even occurred to me to give her one.   So I opened the article, pulling out my car keys ready to head to the nearest drug store.  But what I read left me unsatisfied.  The article listed both reasons for and against giving a multivitamin.  It gave tips on how to select a multivitamin, should I decide to use one.  But in terms of answering the question, the answer was indefinite:  “Experts haven’t come to a consensus on whether or not toddlers should take multivitamins, and the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn’t have an official position on the subject. That means it’s up to you along with your doctor to decide what’s best for your growing child.”

Feeling unsatisfied — albeit somewhat relieved that I had not been doing anything drastically wrong as a parent — I committed to further probing the issue after hours.  I turned to work emails, at which point I read the AAP’s press release, entitled: “Babies and Toddlers Should Learn from Play, Not Screens“.  I once again felt frustrated — this time for the opposite reason I had earlier this morning.  I had a cut and dry answer.  But given my professional expertise, I knew this answer didn’t have adequate research to support its headline, and would actually argue that it is nonsensical, because nowadays you can play on screens.

When you read the statement, it becomes somewhat clear that they are referring to television only.  But I’m concerned that few will make it past the stressful headline and corresponding media-storm it produced.  The statement actually includes a number of helpful guidelines around television: avoid TV in the bedroom; don’t have it on as background noise; media companies often make unsubstantiated educational claims.   These tips are important, but I’m worried they will be overshadowed by a headline that will just produce guilt and fear in parents when what they really need is guidance.  I understand that perhaps there isn’t enough research for the Academy to make a statement on interactive media one way or another, but their “updated” statement was misleading.

As a media professional, the AAP statement left me frustrated because I think it further complicates our job in helping parents navigate the complex media world today’s children are growing up in.  But as a mom, the AAP statement made me rethink my response to the multivitamin debate.  While I had initially been annoyed that it didn’t give me a cut and dry response, I now recognize that it’s forcing me to legitimately consider whether my daughter needs to take vitamins.  To research the pros and cons, to look at her diet and decide if it’s balanced, and — if I’m still not sure what to do — to consult her pediatrician.

As parents, we want rules.  We want clarity.  I want to know — does my child need or not need a multivitamin.  But sometimes the answer is simply not that black and white.   The AAP says babies and toddlers should learn from play, not screens. But nowadays you can play on screens.  Realistically, screen time is part of our children’s lives at every age, so what parents really need is guidance on turning media consumption into rich, intergenerational, interactive experiences that allow children do exactly what the AAP advocates — to learn through play.  Sometimes, the answer is simply not that cut and dry.

Download the AAP’s press release (PDF).

Photo:  Some rights reserved by Wayan Vota on flickr.

Numerous technology ventures aim to improve students’ scores in an increasingly test-focused educational landscape. Challenging that, the innovators behind the Robot Heart Stories project hope that modern technology can spark students’ imagination, fueling the resources needed to inspire better scores: creativity and passion.

Starting Monday, October 17, two classrooms of students –one in Montreal and one in Los Angeles —  must work together to return a lost robot to its home in Outer Space (actually, Los Angeles) by October 28. The classes will work together, sending clues to one another as they guide the robot from its “crash-landing” in Montreal to the classroom in Los Angeles. The students will combine creative writing, geography, math, and science and more in trying to navigate the robot home. Wherever their minds take the robot, filmmakers and photographers will follow, documenting the robot’s struggle as it travels across North America.  Upon completion, the robot will board an actual rocket with a camera, allowing students and viewers across the world to watch its journey home. The creators hope that the students will come away in awe of just how far technology, creativity, and imagination can travel.

Robot Heart Stories from WorkBook Project on Vimeo.

Lance Weiler, the creator, aims to spark innovation and creativity by making it relevant to kids’ lives. Rather than isolating students, technology will unite them, sparking a fire of collaboration and imagination. Weiler used crowd-sourced investments to fuel his project, but believes that teachers globally have the resources to make education relevant.

Individuals can follow the robot’s journey via photographs, which will later be transformed into an illustrated story based on the students’ writings. More information is available at http://robotheartstories.com. Additionally, viewers are invited to download a “heart pack” that can be folded into a robot. For every 1,000 photos uploaded of the robot, Weiler’s team will make a donation to organizations supporting creative writing in schools.

Where would your robot travel? Stay tuned for more coverage of the project as the robot makes its way from Canada to California!

Allison Mishkin is an assistant web producer at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center this fall. A recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with an individualized degree in the Social Implications of Computer Science, she is interested in the intersections between technology and children’s media. Previously, she has conducted research on young girls and STEM education, youth interaction in online communities and worked as a Google Policy Fellow on telecommunications policy.

Picture for a second the first thing you ever constructed, designed, prototyped, or invented. If you’re like most of us, there’s a pretty good chance that you built your idea using toys like LEGOs, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, or perhaps, to your parents’ dismay, a mix of all of the above (good luck getting Play-Doh out of those bricks). Over the years, magazines like MAKE have featured lots of DIY toy projects, but very few talk about designing for Creative Play — how to invent a toy that will not only entertain, but ultimately empower kids to design and share their own imaginative inventions.

Today we present four easy steps for all you budding toy (and digital toy) designers to do for the next generation of kids as LEGO and so many others did for us: inspire and scaffold imagination.

Step 1: Pick your Play Pattern and Hone your Insight

Isaac Newton famously declared, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The same could very well be said for toy design. While there are hundreds of new toys and games released each year, every one of them is rooted in core play patterns derived from basic human behaviors. The not-so-great toys (Pet Rocks) are inherently limited to one or two play patterns (collecting and… well, collecting), but the best toys, like LEGOs, appeal to a variety of play patterns (modeling, collecting, storytelling, invention) over a range of ages and developmental stages. These are called “grow-with-me” toys because kids’ play with the toys adapts over time with their cognitive development… from DUPLOS to LEGOs to MindStorms.

As designers, we should be wary of jumping straight to a particular concept or execution and instead take time up-front to observe these play patterns to identify potential gaps in the child’s experience. Once we’ve identified a gap in a natural play pattern, then we can focus on ways to improve upon and empower the child’s experience with new features and products.

Take, for example, doll play. Dolls and action figures are some of the most popular toys because they’re (sometimes quite literally) vehicles for so many different play patterns. Some kids collect dolls while others use them for storytelling, battling, or nurture play. Looking closely at kids’ storytelling with dolls and action figures, one might observe that children tell incredible stories through narrative play at a young age, but struggle to share those stories through more formal disciplines like Creative Writing. In short, there is a gap between what the child imagines and what his or her tools (toys) currently afford. As a designer, this insight is invaluable. What can we create to help kids bridge this gap and realize their imaginations in a format that is more easily shared with friends and family? (Note: The goal here shouldn’t be to replace the child’s imagination, but to spark it with creative tools.)

Step 2: Choose your Platform

Once you’ve settled on your insight, the next logical step is to figure out what form your concept should take. Traditionally, toys and games offer very different approaches to play. Toys are kid-driven, tangible catalysts for imagination. Games, on the other hand, represent a collection of rules and challenges for achieving a pre-determined objective. Until recently, video games (and their digital platforms) have been similarly limited, but with the advent of mobile touchscreen devices like the iPad, these two worlds are colliding to create tangible, kinesthetic, mobile play experiences for kids. We’ll call this new field Digital Play.

As a toy designer, Digital Play is very exciting. For years, we’ve been stuffing electronics into toys to make them more empowering, but in many cases achieving just the opposite and limiting creativity. Conversely, platforms like the iPad allow us to stuff the toy into the electronics and create hands-on, open-ended, and narrative play experiences that not only replicate traditional toys, but infuse them with digital capabilities to further empower the child’s imagination. In short, regardless of the play pattern you choose, there are more options than ever for realizing your goal.

Step 3: Break, Break, Break it Down

So far, our steps have been pretty generic to the larger field of play. You’re probably asking, “What’s so special about Creative Play?” Well, a lot. Toys for creative play are not “all-in-one” experiences, but rather components of a larger ecosystem — catalysts for an open-ended world that will, if all goes well, extend far beyond even your wildest imagination. Once you’ve picked your play pattern, honed your insight, and chosen your platform, it’s time to break your big idea down into itsy bitsy pieces — not toys themselves, but independent tools that can be flexed, torqued, and manipulated (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) into new and unique creations.

This brings us to two important distinctions between kids and adults. First, most adults are capable of juggling a variety of complex concepts simultaneously. Young children, on the other hand, generally lack the cognitive ability to multitask or follow multi-step sequences. As designers, it’s important to break complex processes and concepts down to their fundamentals – to create Primitives (as a programmer might say) that are more easily grasped and manipulated. Going back to the example of creative writing, it’s important to break down big abstract ideas like “story” into its fundamental components: Character, Setting, and Emotion — and to make implicit concepts like “Narrative Arc” explicit through the structure of the toy (either physically or visually).

These primitives also serve another role: story starters to spark the imagination. This brings us to the second important distinction between kids and adults. Most adults like blank canvases because of their endless possibilities. They’re inspired by the fact that they can create just about anything. Many kids, on the other hand, are just the opposite — those endless possibilities, at least at first, can be more inhibiting than inspiring. Much like product design, constraints in play are in fact empowering — they scaffold a novice’s first steps and challenge the expert to think outside the box/brick.

In short, our greatest hurdle in designing for Creative Play is finding the right level of granularity. Too few components might make for either a conceptually complex or blunt tool. Too many pieces or too much flexibility could overwhelm or under-stimulate.

Step 4: Prototype, Test, Rinse, Repeat… and Produce

Despite what your mother might tell you, you’ve matured a lot since childhood. Sure, you still love toys and games, but you probably don’t play with them in the same way and your brain certainly doesn’t think the same way that it did when you were five years old. This is why it’s critical to kid-test your ideas at every step and, if possible, with different kids every time. If you can find a willing partner, museums are really good places to kid-test given that they have new visitors every day.

Just like any product, the first step should be a good low-fidelity prototype. Paper prototypes are a great start, but it’s important to make sure they’re not too abstract or too delicate. Kids aren’t always capable of making the same cognitive leaps that adults do — screenshots, for example, are much more effective than black and white wireframes. Likewise, play is rough, tough, and hands-on — so your prototype should be robust enough to withstand some abuse.

Once you’ve found the holes in your prototype, go back to the drawing board. Reassess and refine… then go through the cycle again… and again… and again until you come home empty handed… because your kid testers absolutely refused to let go of the toy.

Once you’ve nailed the play experience for your target user, take some time to think about ways to extend it older and younger. How can your toy be a “grow-with-me toy” that is both accessible to younger users and extensible for older kids? How can you utilize older kids’ masterpieces to encourage creativity in your younger users? Might those older “experts” in turn become teachers — inspiring a virtuous cycle of Creative Learning and a whole new generation of playful inventors to follow?

Andy Russell is a toy and game producer and a co-founder of Launchpad Toys, a San Francisco-based educational media startup building digital tools that empower kids to create, learn, and share their ideas through play. The company’s first product, Toontastic, is a Creative Learning tool for the iPad that empowers kids to draw and animate their own cartoons and share them with friends and family around the world.

I actually knew Steve Jobs. I am not telling you this to try to impress you, but to impress upon you that he was a human being with strengths and weaknesses just like you and me.

He contacted me at Sesame Workshop when Pixar was just beginning. The original Toy Story was just in storyboard phase. He wanted to do a 3-D movie with the Sesame Street Muppets next. My team and I went out and met with the Pixar team, and had some questions about their ability to do accurate 3-D renderings and animations of the Muppet characters.

Steve would not rest until he had satisfied all of our questions and wonderings. For about 15 minutes I was Steve Jobs’ best friend — I had his home phone number, his cell phone number, etc. He was just like a little kid with ADHD — calling me about every five minutes to see whether Sesame Workshop had made a decision yet. I do believe that there is a connection between innovation and ADHD. Steve Jobs was wise enough to surround himself with people who could follow up and follow through on the many, MANY ideas that his creative mind generated.

The lesson is — know your strengths and your weaknesses. Know the value of collaboration. Keys to success: Choose collaborators who share your values while complementing your skill set.

The leaves are changing, the air is getting crisp… and your teeth are hurting just LOOKING at all the candy stacked up in the grocery aisles. Yes, it’s October and Halloween is just around the corner!

To celebrate this most playfully creative holiday, we’re very excited to announce that the Cooney Center is partnering with Mobile Learning Finalist Launchpad Toys to create a Spooky Story Contest for kids and parents to create and share their favorite Ghost Stories and Terrifying Tales on Toontastic for the iPad. The winner of the contest will receive a $100 gift certificate to Amazon!

To participate in the contest:

1.     Create a Spooky cartoon using Toontastic for the iPad.

2.     Upload your cartoon to ToonTube and send a link to your cartoon to spookystories@launchpadtoys.com by October 17^th.

3.     Participants will be announced here on October 18^th. Voting will be open through October 24^th.

4.     The contest winner will be announced here on October 25^th.

5.     Contest is open to residents of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia (darn those pesky laws!)

Ghouls and Goblins and Good Luck! We can’t wait to see the bone-chilling stories you and your kids/students come up with!

On Wednesday, October 5, the Washington Post Live will host “Investing in the Future through Early Childhood Education,” a conference that will focus on successful strategies for teaching preschoolers. The conference will bring together federal and local government officials, education experts, and teachers, including the Cooney Center’s Executive Director, Michael Levine. The conference will be streaming live from 10:00 am – 1:30 pm ET.

View the full agenda (PDF) and submit questions on the Washington Post Live website.

In Families Matter, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop’s most recent research report (released May 2011), I take an ecological approach to chronicling how digital media are shaping childhood, parenting, and family life (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). I do so by sharing findings from two complementary studies: a national survey of parents of 3- through 10-year-olds, and in-depth case studies of two young Latina girls and their families. Gabriela Guzman and Sierra Ramirez’s cases provide rich examples of the potential that video games, mobile devices, and websites hold for children’s learning, as well as the threats they pose to their healthy development and family dynamics.

In a recent staff meeting, a colleague assigned to work on the press campaign for Families Matter confessed that it made her “cringe” to know that I observed the Guzman and Ramirez families more than two years ago. “The data is old,” she declared, quite bluntly. But in research terms, I justified quietly to myself, this is the norm: all that coding and recoding, triangulating evidence, writing, and then the drawn-out review process (not to mention conflicting work commitments we academics face) typically prevent findings from being released within a year of running a study. Still, she had a point. News agencies, after all, don’t report on events that happened in 2009. And while a 30-month delay may sit just fine with academics that read the report, I could see how it might turn off our practitioner and policymaker audiences.

My intention today is not to advocate for prolonged research cycles.[1] Rather, I’m here to defend the case study. Because they’re laced with details that date their data collection, they show their age more obviously than other forms of research. And these details, I’m afraid, are what some readers may find dated about Families Matter. I observed the two case families in late 2008 through late 2009, and since then, Wizard 101 and the Kinect have ousted Club Penguin and the Wii–two technologies featured centrally in the case studies-as the devices du jour with young kids. However, what I want to argue is that Gabriela and Sierra’s stories reveal more enduring patterns of how families adopt and adjust to new technologies. In the specific contexts of these homes, we see how new media wriggle their way into kids’ lives, challenge family values, disrupt well-worn routines, and subsequently inspire parental angst, rule setting, and eventual adjustment. New platforms will come, some will stay, and many will go, but these patterns of integration will retain their currency for quite some time.

This is not to suggest that families themselves are immutable. Family members communicate, learn, and play together differently than they did 20 years ago, and parents raise their kids differently than their parents raised them–we don’t need research to tell us this much. What’s different today than in media revolutions of past is that newer technologies (e.g., iPods, texting, YouTube, Facebook), are being widely adopted by consumers within a matter of years, if not just months, compared with the telephone, radio, and television, each of which took decades. Books took a few centuries. It’s no wonder Families Matter felt dated as soon as it went to print. But these increasing penetration rates may also explain why, according to the survey featured in the report, most parents set rules around their young children’s media use on a case-by-case basis. There’s barely time to establish expectations around any new medium before the next one comes along to throw another wrench into the works.

Gabriela’s story provides case-in-point illustrations of these parenting practices against the backdrop of a 2009-vintage Nintendo DS and Motorola RAZR feature (not smart) phone, which five years from now will seem quaint compared to the devices we can only imagine 8-year-olds will be begging their parents for. And yet, I predict that in five (maybe even 10) years, the opening vignette of Gabriela’s case–about the origins of her father’s “no more useless texting rule”–will seem oddly timeless in its portrayal of the micro-level interactions involved in rule setting around new media. In fact, as data from the 2010 parent survey—the piece that lends to the report’s timeliness today–age to the point of irrelevance, the case studies will maintain, if not increase, their value. Readers will find it easier to focus on the questions and issues at the heart of the Guzman and Ramirez cases when the technologies they feature shift from being slightly outdated and therefore very distracting, to very outdated and therefore recognized as something to be ignored.

My hope is that the report’s broad audience of media producers, educators, community leaders, and parents will find the cases useful today, as well as a decade from now. Gabriela and Sierra’s stories pose more questions than they manage to answer about technological interruptions in families with young children. As such, practitioners should find the theoretical discussions surrounding each family’s unique situation helpful for thinking about and dealing with the real-life issues they face every day. But readers will need to unfasten their gazes from the devices themselves to take in the larger ecologies in which these devices are used. If they can recognize the timelessness of Gabriela and Sierra’s cases, they will be better equipped to design and use media in ways that can help children learn, adjust, and thrive in a digital age.

[1] Researchers like Katie Davis at Harvard’s GoodPlay Project are tackling the challenges social scientists face in studying topics that are rapidly changing (like children’s media use), from formulating relevant research questions, to data collection methods, to publication (is a piece still relevant if it uses data from 2007?). I look forward to the solutions they uncover.