How does one know that an educational experience is actually helping students learn? Our company Motion Math makes educations games for the iPad and iPhone that let kids play with numbers. It’s easy for us to think, as we’re making our apps, and watching students play them, to believe that learning is happening, especially because we spend a lot of time ensuring that our designs follow good pedagogical and usability principles. However, the history of educational technology is littered with many false promises and disappointing results, most recently given an overview by Matt Richtel of The New York Times. For these reasons, and for our own self-understanding, it’s important that we sometimes hold our learning technologies up to scientific scrutiny.
Monthly Archives: December 2011
Kids and Social Media: Networked Participation Workshop Kids and Social Media: Networked Participation Workshop
It has been a whirlwind few months for me as I have finished my dissertation, begun my fellowship at the Cooney Center, and, now, am writing my first blog post! One of the big events for me as a Cooney Center fellow so far was attending the JGCC’s “Networked Participation Workshop”, which was funded by […]
Kids and Social Media: Networked Participation Workshop
December 12, 2011
It has been a whirlwind few months for me as I have finished my dissertation, begun my fellowship at the Cooney Center, and, now, am writing my first blog post! One of the big events for me as a Cooney Center fellow so far was attending the JGCC’s “Networked Participation Workshop”, which was funded by […]
An Update from Filament Games: WInners of the First National STEM Video Game Challenge
December 12, 2011
The developer’s prize for the first National STEM Video Game Challenge went to Filament Games, headed by Dan White and Dan Norton, for You Make Me Sick, a game in which students design a bacteria or virus and attempt to infect a target host. Creative Director Dan Norton writes in with an update and shares […]
Engaging Students and Families in a Digital Age: Lessons for Educators and Practitioners
December 12, 2011
This article originally appeared in the Harvard Family Research Project’s December issue of the FINE: Family Involvement Network of Educators newsletter. Lori Takeuchi, Director of Research for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and author of the recent report Families Matter: Engaging Families in a Digital Age, discusses her research on how children use technology across […]
Bringing Speech Recognition to Reading Instruction
December 5, 2011
Marilyn Jager Adams’s report, “Technology for Developing Children’s Language and Literacy: Bringing Speech Recognition to the Classroom,” was released this fall by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. This commentary was recently published by Education Week. As everyone who follows such things knows, U.S. students, as a group, do not read very well. Yet, if […]
An Empirical Wish-list
December 30, 2011
For the second year in a row, the iPad is the most popular item that children are asking for as a holiday gift. Given that it is the season for making wish-lists, it is in this spirit that I offer my own iPad research wish-list for 2012. The items on this list will surely keep […]