This past spring, Global Kids worked on a crowdsourced project to develop “Six Ways to Look at Badging Systems Designed for Learning,” a list of six different goals that badging systems are often designed to meet. During the summer, we beta-tested our own badging system within two of our programs to see in which of these six ways we could demonstrate positive growth.

The first program was the Virtual Video Project, which focused on creating an animated film about climate change as part of Global Kids’ participation in the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development. The film was designed to raise awareness about real-life events that took place at the Rio+20 Conference and highlight what youth can do to live in a more sustainable world. (more…)

Laurie Rabin was an intern in the research department here at the Cooney Center this past summer; we’ve recently dug up a copy of a letter that she wrote to herself — from the future! — upon completing her internship to her younger self as she was about to begin her adventure. We are pleased to share this letter with you, with Laurie’s permission.

Dear Laurie (circa June 2012, B(JGC)C),

First of all, congratulations! You made it here. Remember when you emailed the Cooney Center website to your best friend almost six months ago and said “I don’t know if they want a summer intern, but I’m going to be it.” Well you’re it. Great job! Just like you thought, this is the hub of kids and digital media research.

Now get ready because you’re about to have a great summer. Nerding out about that awesome lobby display with the moving pictures of all the Sesame Street characters? Don’t worry, everyone else thinks it’s awesome too.

You’re probably coming in here thinking that you’re going to do a lot of “intern work” — transcribing, coding and the like. Guess what? You’re right. But you’ll also plan a focus group, learn about technology within Hispanic and Latino families, hear about learning through embodied cognition, and about parents’ co-reading habits with e-books. This will be better schooling in children, children’s media, and children’s technology habits than any class you could take. Best of all, you not only get to sit in on research meetings, but you get to participate. You get to share what you are doing with everybody else and they’ll look at you like you did something really impressive even though it was really no big deal. When you’re in a meeting, your opinion will be valued—here you will not just be an intern, you will truly be part of the team. Of course, you will have to do a lot of transcribing and coding—but you know what? It feels pretty good when it’s all finished. You’ll even get to use that VBA you spent a semester on and thought was a waste of time. And entering contact information into a database is pretty much like a beat-the-clock game. You’ll beat the clock, don’t worry (of course, you set it for yourself). (more…)

The Cooney Center is thrilled to introduce our new fellows, who have joined us in our New York City office this month. Please join us in giving them a warm welcome!

Hello all! I am Anna Ly, one of the fellows here at the Cooney Center, and it is my pleasure to introduce my colleague, Christina Hinton!

Christina has spent a lot of time at Harvard. She completed her doctorate and master’s in mind, brain and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, and she must really love it there because now she is a faculty member at Harvard, teaching graduate students about research and development in education. However, she has managed to escape the long, cold Boston winters quite often, traveling across the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe and the Middle East. Her leadership in educational neuroscience has given her the opportunity to lecture in all of those regions! Christina’s expansive international experience started when she worked in multilateral diplomacy and international policy-making at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in Paris. There she co-penned two books, Understanding the Brain: The Birth of a Learning Science and Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding. After learning to navigate the complex political, economic, and cultural aspects of education policy-making, Christina was inspired to make a direct impact on the lives of children through educational media. She joined the Cooney Center this fall, and the rest is history. When Christina is not at Sesame or Harvard, you might catch her dancing, zumba-ing (is that a verb yet?), or even trapezing!

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This past Saturday, October 6, kids in over 30 countries in 6 continents participated in the Global Cardboard Challenge, the next chapter from the folks that brought you the short film “Caine’s Arcade.”  The fanfare around the film, featuring a 9 year-old Hispanic boy named Caine’s elaborate handmade cardboard arcade, was the impetus for the formation of the Imagination Foundation.  The non-profit, founded by “Caine’s Arcade” filmmaker Nirvan Mullick, aims to “help find, fund, and foster creativity and entrepreneurship in kids.”  The Foundation is currently developing programs supporting kid-friendly makerspaces and providing opportunities for STEAM education (which means placing the arts & humanities very much into the center of STEM education).

The Foundation launched the Global Cardboard Challenge, an annual worldwide day of play and tinkering coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the flash mob Nirvan organized to surprise Caine with a big group of people eager to play his inventive games.  Each Global Cardboard Challenge event this weekend was organized by local organizations and community groups in schools, museums, libraries, churches, and even in kitchens and backyards, all sharing information via Facebook or the event’s online hub. From Hong Kong to Homer, Alaska, friends, families, and community members came out to celebrate kids’ imaginative creations made out of cardboard and other recycled materials.

I spent a few hours on Saturday at the flagship Global Cardboard Challenge event in Boyle Heights, across the street from the original Caine’s Arcade.  I’ve posted about Caine’s Arcade on this blog before, both the film and the physical location in East LA.  I met Nirvan, Caine, and Caine’s dad George a couple weeks after the flashmob, when Nirvan screened an early version of the film at the DIY Days conference, and I have also been volunteering as an educational advisor to the Imagination Foundation.

Earlier this year, upon the worldwide release of the film on YouTube and Vimeo, I wrote, “Caine’s Arcade is a timely and brilliant example of how our society needs to rethink the ways of doing and thinking that connect children to larger bodies of knowledge and allow them to share their creations with a larger public.”  Having spent a great deal of time walking around the event on Saturday, talking with kids and their parents about what brought them there, I want to slightly tweak my earlier observation.  I think this Caine’s Arcade transmedia universe not only can support children‘s learning across media, but also help to connect parents who might not otherwise have the opportunities to participate as well.

One conversation in particular stuck with me, emphasizing the importance of diverse types of parent engagement, in school and out-of-school contexts.  I walked up to two little girls working on building handles so that they could walk around with a large handpainted cardboard Caine’s Arcade sign.  I asked one of their mothers how she had first heard of the event.  Realizing that English was not her primary language, I tried again in Spanish, asking if perhaps they had watched the “Caine’s Arcade” movie online at home.  She told me that they do not have internet access at home, and then called her daughter over to speak to me.  Her daughter’s English was much better than my Spanish, and I worried that I might have made the mother uncomfortable by asking first in English.  The girl eagerly said that she had seen both the first and second follow-up “Caine’s Arcade” short films at school, and had told her mom about the Global Cardboard Challenge event.

The exchange brought to mind for me the dissertation of a 2007 graduate of my Ph.D. program in Communication at USC Annenberg and current Asst. Professor of Communication at Rutgers, Vikki Katz.  In particular, I thought of an article of hers, based off of her dissertation work, published in the Journal of Children and Media and entitled “How children of immigrants use media to connect their families to the community: The case of Latinos in South Los Angeles” (2010).

In it, Katz describes how while most research on children and media in the home focus on majority culture, middle-class families, little research focuses on immigrant families and the ways in which children in those families “broker” new and traditional media forms to connect their families to local resources.  Most of these children speak both the majority and minority language while many parents are monolingual.  Thus, the children not only translate information from media artifacts such as newspapers and TV, but also advocate on behalf of their parents and help connect them with community resources.  Writes Katz, “For parents who are unable to interact in the majority language, children broker connections to media to compensate for their parents’ limited traditional and new media literacies” (p. 299).  Katz’s research “highlights the need for serious explorations into how race/ethnicity, immigration status, and class may affect children’s media worlds and relationships to communication technologies”  (p. 331).  The little girl I talked to would never have watched the “Caine’s Arcade” video at home, and thus through her internet access at school and her teachers’ interest in “Caine’s Arcade,” brokered her mother’s inclusion in this community event in Boyle Heights, which was also attended by other community arts groups and youth outreach organizations.

The “Caine’s Arcade” film has engaged many parents through its spread across the internet, and indeed, I talked to many parents living in East LA and South LA who saw the film on YouTube and heard about the Global Cardboard Challenge event through using Facebook.  In order to engage all kinds of families in children’s formal and informal learning opportunities, such as the kinds proposed by the Imagination Foundation, it is of vital importance to understand the media worlds of language minority groups in the US, and to recognize the multi-faceted nature of the kinds of resources parents have access to and feel most comfortable engaging with.

Photos by Meryl Alper

At Launchpad Toys, we’re working to inspire creativity in children through play with digital toys and tools like our flagship storytelling app, Toontastic. As tablet usage in young children increases year after year (NPD showed 13% growth between 2011 and 2012), it has become more important than ever to provide kids with quality learning tools that maximize their time on touchscreen devices. Still, in the immortal words of former President George W. Bush, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” With over two million cartoons created on Toontastic by over 600,000 kids from 150 countries around the world, we decided this summer to take a closer, more scientific look at how children are interacting with the app and what they were learning from it. (more…)

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, some of the best-selling video games included familiar titles such as Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Oregon Trail—products that not only set the standard for video games as educational tools and but also launched an entire industry of consumer products intended to both educate and entertain. Through the success of these titles and numerous others, the “edutainment” industry blossomed and many visionary leaders and reputable companies were innovating in this realm. The design, development and distribution of children’s games intended to both educate and entertain was a blossoming industry, and one that held much excitement and promise both in terms of it’s educational potential and market opportunities. (more…)