Since my post a couple of weeks ago about Scratch, Meagan Bromley has contributed two really wonderful posts about her work with Gamestar Mechanic and their Online Learning Program where she is currently serving as a mentor/teacher.  Between Gamestar Mechanic, Scratch, Meagan’s posts and mine, one very clear throughline that I see emerging is the value being placed on connectivity within the world of creatively driven educational media.

Technology has provided us with a level of connectivity that we have never known before. Yet in terms of young people, with a few exceptions, not enough is being done to teach the affordances and potential consequences of this connectivity. Thankfully, there are wonderful, educationally conscious people who are developing software, online communities, and digital experiences that give kids the chance to hone their ability to interact and connect with others in safe and creatively enriching environments. As Meagan and I have mentioned, both Scratch and Gamestar are two such places where this is happening. Both sites offer kids exciting opportunities to design and create within the context of a group of peers. This community is designed to provide support, feedback, collaboration, and that wonderful feeling of being a part of something bigger than just yourself. Not only that, but both sites have created really nice ways of highlighting the ways in which kids are impacted by and pushed forward by each other.

Scratch’s remixing capabilities not only give kids the chance to build upon and learn from one another’s work, but the remix tree visualization gives users a really great sense of the connectivity of each other’s work.

Gamestar Mechanic’s feedback system is awesome. Users can give overall ratings and difficulty ratings for each others games and are then asked very specific questions to provide a variety of feedback for the different elements of a game. 

Beyond the online interface, both programs are doing a lot to connect with their users and to offer exciting opportunities for them connect with others in novel ways. Gamestar’s recent Online Learning Program utilized professional game designers to provide mentorship, guidance, and feedback through written reviews and video conferencing. They also seem to have some exciting offerings for teachers to help bring the program into classrooms.

Likewise, Scratch is being used in very exciting ways in both formal and informal settings. I’ve spent a number of exciting afternoons working with educators in afterschool programs as kids work together on projects; bouncing ideas off of each other, testing each others code, and utilizing the online community for inspiration and guidance. Whereas I remember my time in computer class being spent with very strict instructions to keep my eyes on my own screen, I walk into these computer classes and I see kids collaborating and working together in teams, helping each other solve problems, and developing super valuable cooperative and collaborative abilities. What I love about this is that technology isn’t just being used to connect people through a screen but it’s also helping to facilitate in person connections. With the importance of those “in person connections” in mind the Scratch Community has worked incredibly hard over the last few years to create Scratch Day; a day in which Scratchers from all over the world get together in their communities to create, play, and learn together. This past year there were over 180 events in 43 countries! At the Media Lab alone, we hosted 400+ Scratchers, and it was truly remarkable to see all the playing and creating that kids, teachers, and parents were engaging in together.

Having safe, challenging, and exciting opportunities in which to connect with others is invaluable for young people today. It’s really exciting to see examples of digital environments and programs that are encouraging and scaffolding the process of what it means to connect with, collaborate with, and learn from others through the use of technology. And just for the record, Scratch and Gamestar are by no means the only two players in this sandbox. There are lots of other people, programs, and resources that are providing great opportunities for young people. Cathy Davidson and Mark Surman just wrote an fantasticpiece for Fast Company and they mention some of the incredible work being done at Mozilla. If you know of other great programs/software/communities for young people that are encouraging similar creativity and connectivity please tell us about them in the comments sections below!

Aaron is a recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Technology, Innovation, and Education. While there he spent his time focusing on how media and technology can be used to foster creativity and connectivity among children. As part of that focus, he had wonderful opportunities to work as an intern for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Scratch at the MIT Media Lab. He is also just embarking on a new position as the Assistant Director of Content for PBSKids Interactive.

Much of what we hear when people talk about games for learning may be behind the potential of video games to teach traditional content, but there’s also a very exciting, and increasingly popular trend in education of kids as game designers. But what do we really mean when we say kids as designers? What skills and perspectives are kids getting by engaging in the game design process? As Aaron Morris recently discussed on the Cooney Center blog, an essential part of “21st Century Skills” or “Digital Literacy” is getting kids to engage within online communities, and build their own interactive media. In my experiences so far this summer as an instructor in theGamestar Mechanic Online Learning Program, a new curriculum being offered by E-Line Media, I’ve seen my students do just that – and as a result, develop a number of competencies beyond traditional classroom skills.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, a major focus of the Gamestar Mechanic Online Program is for students to learn about and practice working within the iterative design process.  This means that designs are always meant to change and be revised according to feedback and new ideas that come out of playtesting, brainstorming and more playtesting.  Just like professional game designers do, students are encouraged to continue reiterating their design in response to critical feedback they receive as a part of the program.  For students, this means that sometimes they work for hours or days putting their heart and soul into a new game design, and then as soon as they turn it in (along with their requisite blood, sweat and tears) the instructor comes back at them with a “revise” message full of suggested changes, and they have to, oh so gracefully, go back to the online workshop, think a lot more, and change things.

As many students have discovered, game design doesn’t happen overnight — a designer’s work is never done!

For a lot of students, this has also encouraged a shift in thinking from “I’m done” or “I got an A” to more of a workshop approach where theoretically, a design may never be fully “done.”  Essentially, it’s an approach that tries to communicate to students that they are designers, and as such, their designs are not “right or wrong” or even “good or bad” but rather just at different stages of what is a much larger design process. By this same token, because every student of game design in the Online Program is a designer, everyone in the online environment is a fellow designer with valuable feedback to offer as a part of the iterative design process. This approach begins to replicate the diplomatic experience of designing with collaborative working groups and, as many of the assignments term it, give kids practice in “being a thoughtful critic.”  And everyone has something different to offer!

Creativity comes in many forms

Through the different assignments in the curriculum, students practice planning and building designs with special care given to game mechanics and player interactions, as well as the development of characters and stories. They have a lot of opportunities to thrive and really develop a skill that they may be especially interested in, while getting a lot of practice with other important aspects of design. While some students place a lot of emphasis on the story or look and feel of a game, others are incredibly focused on how to create a tricky puzzle or create the proper time patterns for a player to get through rows of blasting enemies.

For example, in an assignment that asks students to recreate a classic game, I’ve been amazed to find versions of games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and PacMan that replicate the same look, story or functionality as the original using combinations of sprites in creative ways. And, as a member of the furiously-blow-into-a-Nintendo-game-cartridge-to-“fix”-it generation, I’m a pretty tough critic!

So, what next?

With a number of promising platforms available for kids to design their own games (among them GameMaker,Multimedia Fusion, Microsoft Kodu, Scratch, Little Big Planet, and of course Gamestar Mechanic!) it’s no surprise that more and more opportunities like the Gamestar Online Learning Program are springing up in schools, summer camps and after-school settings. For parents and teachers interested in getting their kids involved, registration for the fall session is now open on the E-Line Media website: http://gamestarmechanic.com/onlinelearning

Also, for ambitious young designers, there are also numerous challenges and competitions to showcase their game designs and win cash prizes to support themselves financially in future projects. To name just a few, over the last 2 years The Microsoft Kodu Cup, The National STEM Video Game Challenge, BAFTA’s Young Game Designers Competition in the UK, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards sponsored by the AMD Foundation have given out tens of thousands of dollars to young designers for their work in this field.

In the meantime, stay tuned for more news from me as the summer winds down and my students prepare for the last part of their summer experience — getting their final games reviewed by a game industry professional!

What makers of technology for early education can learn from Sesame Street.

Whether you’re at a restaurant or on an airplane, you can’t miss changes in adult-child interactions from just a generation ago. Everyone is plugged in. It seems almost quaint to see kids and adults engaged together in screen-free play. Four-year-olds now consume three hours of media per day, and fourth graders more than five hours. And it is not just youth—adults are also increasingly finding it difficult to turn off their digital lives. This has inspired a tremendous amount of philosophizing about how smartphones, iPads, and gaming consoles may be hurting both childhood and parenting.

But given that the number and variety of digital options will only increase, wouldn’t it be more productive to explore how we can effectively transform media consumption into quality family time? What if we viewed the digital deluge as a new opportunity to tap into the potential of interactive technologies to help reunite generations in playful learning together? In recent years, a great deal of attention has been paid to the potential of video games for good—President Obama has even appointed an expert adviser who is fashioning the first national policy initiative on video games’ role in education, health, the environment, and numerous other areas. But a vital component of games in the public interest has remained largely overlooked: intergenerational gameplay. (more…)