Students at a workshop at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

On a bright sunny morning after a February snowstorm, kids and their parents were lined up outside the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in Manhattan. But they weren’t there solely to see the many museum treasures. They were there to attend a workshop to make video games that they will enter into the National STEM Video Game Challenge. The excitement was palpable as the kids funneled into a room outfitted with laptops.

“Do you have an idea for a video game you’d like to make?” the workshop facilitator asked one of the kids.

“I have A LOT of ideas!” she replied.

She wasn’t alone. The kids were bursting with ideas, eager to learn what it takes to make the video games they love.

One of the many benefits of holding game making workshops at places like AMNH is the access to science educators on the museum’s staff. Enthusiastic and highly knowledgeable, they create the bridge between game making skills and the principles that play out all around us in the natural and man-made world. The kids learned about how a healthy system functions and how the components of the natural world work together in harmony. To give the kids hands-on science experience, they were taken on a guided tour of the Milstein Hall of Ocean Life, the crown jewel of the AMNH’s exhibits. In the Hall of Ocean Life, kids and their parents realized just how magical our world really is and how important is it for us to care for it.

What is the National STEM Video Game Challenge?

The National STEM Video Game Challenge, presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media, launched on February 11th. The Challenge, now in its third year, aims to pique interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among our nation’s youth by tapping into students’ enthusiasm for playing and making video games. Students use free, open-source software to create playable video games or a written video game design document rather than a playable video game. Details about all of these options are available at http://stemchallenge.org. The competition is open to middle school and high school students in grades 5 – 12 through April 24, 2013 and is free to enter.

How do kids create games and enter the Challenge?

Details on how to enter, game design resources, and a calendar of upcoming workshops on creating games are available at www.stemchallenge.org. Among the game design resources are video tutorials, links to open-source game-making software that can be downloaded free of charge to any computer, and toolkits for parents, teachers, librarians, afterschool program facilitators, and mentors to help kids create their games.

Game workshops are underway across the country.

The workshop at the AMNH was one of over 20 workshops being staged across the country this month and next month to promote the Challenge. In New York City, the partnerships are run by E-Line in cooperation with Hive Digital Media Learning Fund in The New York Community Trust and Global Kids. These groups have trained high school youth ambassadors to teach younger kids how to create games. They learn the principles of game creation as well as the technical skills needed to use Gamestar Mechanic, one of the free, open-source game making platforms that can be used to enter the Challenge.

And there are prizes, too!

One middle school and one high school winner will be selected for each game creation platform. All winners will receive an AMD-powered laptop computer including game design and educational software. Each winner’s sponsoring organization will receive a cash prize of $2000. They will also be honored at a culminating event in New York City in June.

Why STEM?

Youth leaders from Global Kids lead a workshop at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

With our world becoming increasingly complex, science, technology, engineering, and math are playing a larger and larger role in our daily lives. Soon, having a deep understanding of these subjects could be as much of a requirement for employment as knowing how to use basic computer programs like Excel and Microsoft Word. In short, STEM knowledge will become a part of every professional field. People who build products and services using STEM knowledge, or who at the very least understand at a deep level how technology works, will have the greatest influence over the global economy.

Why use video games to teach STEM skills?

The best way to engage children with technology in a healthy, meaningful way is through games that are fun to play and teach them important skills like reading, writing, language development, design, systems-based learning, creativity, and collaboration. The National STEM Video Game Challenge hopes to motivate STEM learning by leveraging students’ natural excitement to play and make video games. With these skills in their back pockets, they will not only have a better understanding of the world around them but will be able to shape the world in which they wish to live. They will be empowered to build strong, healthy communities and they will be able to connect with, learn from, and share their experiences with people across the globe.

What kind of impact does the Challenge have on students?

More than 3,700 middle and high school youth participated in the 2012 Challenge, a 650% increase over its inaugural year. Twenty-eight youth were selected as winners last year and two winners from the inaugural year of the competition were invited to showcase their games at the White House Science Fair in February 2012. The Challenge opens up a whole new world for kids, showing them the opportunities that await them in professional STEM fields.

“I consider winning the STEM challenge to be one of the best achievements of my life. Creating the game opened my eyes to the world of computers, which I had never even considered to be interesting before,” said Julia Weingaertner, Middle School category winner, 2012 National STEM Challenge.

Sponsors make the Challenge possible.

The STEM Challenge is supported by title sponsors the AMD Foundation, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, the Entertainment Software Association and national community sponsors the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Hive Digital Media Learning Fund in The New York Community Trust. We are grateful for their generous support.

For additional information on the Challenge, please contact any of the following members of the STEM Challenge Team:

Christa Avampato
Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop

Kerri Schlottman
E-Line Media

Press inquiries:
Jodi Lefkowitz
Sesame Workshop

This article originally appeared in Mass Digi’s State of Play blog on Boston.com on February 21, 2013.

Albert Einstein once said that play is the highest form of research, yet many students seem to experience less play as they grow older. That’s true even as videogames are earning more respect as learning tools; and as some educators buck the trend and encourage students to learn through play.

That said, there can be real obstacles to training teachers how to use games in the classroom, or proving the marketability of learning games to commercial companies. Teachers work with restricted class times, limited access to computers, and antiquated academic standards. And in the games industry, the rise and fall of learning games has made some companies wary of the enormous investment that new games require.

That’s what we do at the Learning Games Network: show teachers how to use already available games in the classroom, and collaborate on new learning games that can be used both in and out of classrooms.

As an industry, we have long been cursed by the fact that we never seem to belong. We hear that learning games are too educational; or learning games are not educational enough. Or perhaps most heartbreaking of them all: Learning games are not real games!

In truth, a well-designed learning game retains many of the same elements as a good commercial game. Good games tell good stories. Their art engages players, and their mechanics offer hours of play. Most of all, good learning games ask us to experiment, to take on new identities, and to learn from our failures. A big red ‘F’ discourages students, but a ‘Game Over’ screen reinvigorates them. If a game can properly marry play with a subject matter, the potential for learning becomes all the more powerful.

The rate of adoption of games on the part of teachers is a major hurdle to the widespread use of learning games. And for good reason; games can be giant beasts to manage, whether it’s Civilization, spanning millennia of ancient history, or Portal, exploring an immersive world of physics puzzles. Still, the right game can certainly teach ‘hard skills’ such as algebra, reading or writing. The right game can also teach strategic thinking, problem-solving, and interpretive analysis, soft skills sometimes overlooked in curricula. Perhaps most encouragingly, such games can be used both in and out of the classroom.

As a non-profit that spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Education Arcade and University of Wisconsin’s Games+Learning+Society group, LGN’s mission is to support the development of the learning games industry. In our experience, failed learning games often start with a game that may have once been fun, only to cram in learning elements. Imagine your elation at nearing the end of a space-shooter level, only to be met by an extraneous algebra problem.

Other games make the mistake of starting with a learning goal and adding gaming elements. Who wants to catch all the ‘fraction monsters’? The most successful development of a learning game starts with both learning and play. Play-testing with students and communicating with teachers at early stages, and throughout the iterative design process, is the only way to be sure that a game will have a chance of being successful, although both can be overlooked by the commercial gaming industry.

The development of a learning game may be different from a commercial game, but one goal is the same: to create a fun experience. The key lies in getting a well-balanced team of designers, learning and context experts, and producers around the table from the beginning to push and pull on the design in a way that builds powerful and fun game mechanics, all based around key understandings of how learners develop in a given content area.

If you build a fun game, and show the student how the underlying content of the game has application in the real world, they will want to learn more about the subject. We need to encourage play. The work will inevitably follow.

By Michael Suen, community producer, and Adam Mandeville, producer, Learning Games Network

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The State of Play, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors.

MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

This post was originally published on 360kid’s blog and appears here with permission.

For more than a decade I’ve been going to the annual NY Toy Fair, and I go primarily for one reason. To check out the latest technology toys. I’ve seen some amazing toys over the years, as well as hundreds, maybe thousands of other toys that just didn’t make the cut. This year a few new tech toy products caught my eye, and I’d like to share what excites me about them. I’m not highlighting these products because of their suggested retail price, and my praise has nothing to do with how well I think they might sell come next holiday season. My interest is in the idea, and the execution of that idea. With that as background, let’s dig in.

Barbie’s Makeup Mirror by Mattel

Let me start by saying Barbie is not my thing. I’m not really drawn to Barbie, and I usually pass right by all things related to dolls, but not this year. In an iPad world filled with shovelware there are few tangible toy and app collaborations that rise to the level of noteworthy. There have been too many forced mergers of toys and apps together on the iPad that simply don’t work. The toy world has been carelessly forcing this merger, hoping to find an answer without actually understanding the question… and that’s where this Barbie product really shines. Finally, someone merged software and a child’s play pattern together seamlessly. This vanity toy reminds me of the vanity toy tables that were popular with young girls many years ago. Dress up and pretend play have always been a strong play pattern with young children. This app and toy combination hits the nail on the head, by using the iPad’s onboard camera to allow a user to play and try on different personalities through digital makeup, and then easily share those creations with a friend. Lots of fun and lots of strong play. Bravo Mattel! My hope is what you have created will shine as a beacon for the rest of the toy world (and app world as well) to learn from, that you just can’t throw an app and a toy together and call it fun. Find the play pattern first, and build from there. Plain and simple.

Flutterbyes by Spin Master

This next tech toy product defines a real milestone in the toy industry. The Spin Master flying fairy product called Flutterbyes nearly knocked me over when I saw it. Why? The toy industry has been dreaming of bringing a small flying fairy to market long before I started attending Toy Fair. I’ve seen toy inventors talk about it, wonder, plan, scheme, invent, try, fail, try again, and yet there has never been any really great breakthrough. Ever. Until now. Spin Master did it, and it makes sense that they achieved this milestone since they have been sitting on some serious flying toy technology through their Air Hogs line. This milestone marks the beginning of light weight rechargeable batteries that can be a part of all kinds of future flying toys, as well as the flying stabilization technology included within. Just imagine where this will go. This flying fairy is one simple, and elegant toy. Well done Spin Master! (Video clip)

Cubelets by Modular Robotics

I grew up on electronics kits. Lot’s of pre-cut wires and metal spring connectors were part of my everyday electronic play. Spending say 30 minutes building a project with another 15 minutes to figure out where the mistake was in order for the whole thing to work. No more! Cubelets has success built-in from the moment you place one cube next to another. Cubelets are a series of electronic cubes where each cube has its own unique characteristic. Some cubes are power sources. Others have motors. Some have lights. Others include sensors and some even include modifiable logic through programming. There’s even a website where you can download sample programming code made by other Cubelet fans to try out on your own. What most electronic kits miss is the ability to experiment and this collection of cubes allows for never ending building and experimentation. Want to make your own motion detection robot? Easy. Want to make a lighthouse? Done. Have an idea for something totally unique and original? You can make it! This is an amazingly powerful toy with endless possibilities. I can’t wait to see how this company grows over the next year. (Video clip)

These are the big ideas I thought were executed marvelously at this year’s Toy Fair. I do have additions to my list, but I have been following these products and companies long before Toy Fair. They include Romo the robot from Romotive (video clip), Sphero from Orbotix (video clip), and the brainwave sensing technology from the company NeuroSky. All strong contenders to keep an eye out for in the tech toy space this year.

Did you go to Toy Fair? Was there a toy or technology that caught your attention? Was there something you saw that was a step forward in this space? Or maybe a step backward? Please share in the comments below!

Scott Traylor is a writer, speaker, and founder of 360KID, a youth-focused technology company specializing in product ideation, market testing, and creation of interactive learning products for kids. Scott can be reached at Scott@360KID.com

Flickr/Passetti

A little while back I was playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare with one of my patients, we’ll call him Alex*.  Twenty minutes into our game, I was clearly losing badly and dying a lot.  Although I am a gamer-affirmative therapist, first-person shooters have never been a favorite of mine.  In fact it was only recently that I started playing them at home and with patients at all.  The game ended with me having died 25 times to his 2.  Alex chuckled as I tried to swallow my frustration.  He reassured me that he had “sucked too” at COD when he started, and asked if we had time for another round.  It took every ounce of therapeutic stamina to acquiesce.

He fiddled with a few custom settings that were mysterious to me and round two began.  Within a minute I had downed him twice with ease, and after the third kill I became a little suspicious.  “Did you give yourself a handicap?” I asked.  Turned out he had adjusted his health down to nearly nothing.  As we sat there playing a game of war and killing, I realized with a start that I was seeing not just aggression, but compassion as well.

Much, recently, and perennially, has been discussed about the possible connections between video games and violent behavior.  Studies and metastudies have alternately supported and decried the correlation between video games and violence or desensitization to violence.  In the midst of these heated debates, worried parents and family members of gamers try to make sense from spin, as they raise children in a world of technology light years away from the world they grew up in.

In his book, The Gamification of Learning and Instruction, Karl M. Kapp writes that “games are based on models of the real world. A game may be regarded as a dynamic model of reality in which the model provides a representation of reality at a particular period of time. This is known in the academic literature as an operating model, as distinct from verbal graphic, mathematical or physical models. It is also important to note that the modeled reality may be hypothetical, imagine, or fictional as if often the case in games like Dungeons and Dragons and video games like the Halo series.”

If games are in fact models of the world, should we be surprised that many video games have content of violence, or for that matter compassion.  We live in a world and a time of immense conflict and violence, where planes fly into skyscrapers and people kill children.  Any model that is to be experientially accurate must struggle with that.  If video games had no meaningful referent to the world we live in they would also be unable to provide any sense of escape or entertainment.  They need to resemble our experience without being seen as identical to it.

From the outside in, parents can have a hard time grasping this.  They see blood and carnage, and recognize what the model is, but not playing themselves do not necessarily experience the ways video game are not identical to the world at large.  Media can often aggravate this hype, by taking the view from the outside in as well, and implying it is the whole story.

But here are some facts to think about.  Wikipedia states that 12 million people have downloaded and presumably played “Angry Birds” on their iPhones and iPads.  Yet the reality is that 12 million people have not as a result taken up animal cruelty or ornithology.  In 2010, Joystiq reported that Farmville had surpassed 80 million players, and yet we have not seen a large spike in people taking up farming as a career in the U.S.  And as someone who has played Call of Duty and experienced it from the inside, I can tell you that the feelings I associated most quickly to it were those I had when I played Hide and Seek as a child, rather than a dangerous surge in aggression.

In my work I try to balance my reading the research on video games and violence with my patients’ internal experience of it.  Parents often struggle with this, and in general remembering that no matter how close they are to their children they are not within their psyches.  Few actually try to play the games to see if their experiences playing match their experiences observing, and this is understandable because the learning curve to play many games is steeper than anything adults have experienced since high school.  This is largely because in high school and college, most adults were taught to identify the area of knowledge and expertise that comes most easily or is most profitable to them and silo down in it for the rest of their lives.

Not long ago, a story was released of a man who had hired virtual hit men to stalk and kill his adult son in the video game he played.  If you are a parent you may find this stunning, or you may find it on one end of a continuum you identify with, namely the frustration and urge to control your child’s use of, choice of, and time spent playing video games.  Many of us justify this by blaming video games for poor academic performance or behavior, and then are mystified when the games are taken away, and academics still suffer.  Because the underlying issues are not addressed the video games are identified as the culprit, and then Magic: The Gathering cards are singled out, and when they are removed something else takes it place, including alcohol or other substances.

What we need to remember is that people are often learning things from within the model of different video games that may in fact be preparing them for work in the 21st century.  This includes becoming desensitized.  Desensitization is not only a broad term, but also one which gets a bad rap in our society.  But the truth of the matter is that many occupations require a level of desensitivity, which allows us to effectively perform a task in the face of difficult feelings evoked by it.

This includes first-responders such as EMRs, police and fireman, for whom being sensitive in the moment of a crisis might be overwhelmed and put themselves and others at risk.  It also includes medical professionals, including therapists, who need to treat people while simultaneously seeing horrific injuries.  One ophthalmologist I know actually credits playing video games as a child with preparing him for the hand-eye coordination necessary to perform complex and delicate surgical procedures, but I also wonder if a certain level of desensitization to the experience of what he is doing to another person’s eye in that moment isn’t also necessary.

No amount of research can eliminate the need for empathy or compassion, whether you are a therapist or a child watching your therapist struggle with frustration in a video game.  As models of reality video games may always need to allow for the possibility of violence and desensitization in them, but they also provide experiences to learn about compassion and sensitivity as well.  As a species we have the propensity of both, and at least in the short run we are more likely to increase compassion and understanding than we are to eliminate violence.

*Alex is based on several patients whose identifying information has been disguised to protect patient privacy.
Mike Langlois, LICSW received his BA from Connecticut College in 1991, and his MSW from Smith College School for Social Work in 1994.  He has over 15 years of experience counseling adults and families. His work includes treating patients who use video games from a gamer-affirmative stance, and his theoretical background combines psychodynamic theory, contemporary cognitive and learning theory with cutting edge technologies.  He is currently an adjunct faculty member of Boston College School for Social Work and a teaching associate in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, where he supervises interns and clinicians.  He also serves on the Massachusetts Commission for LGBT Youth. Read more at gamertherapist.org.

Last month, the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub, made possible by grants from the MacArthur Foundation, published a research report on the findings of the Connected Learning Research Network, a group led by scholars such as Mimi Ito, Sonia Livingstone, S. Craig Watkins, and Katie Salen.  The Connected Learning Research Network, according to the report, is “an interdisciplinary collaboration among researchers, designers, and practitioners to advance an evidence-driven approach to learning, the design of learning environments, and educational reform that addresses contemporary problems of educational equity.”

The report summarized an international investigation into the ways that new media, embedded within a strong network of social relationships, can support young people’s interest-driven learning and direct that learning towards traditional educational, economic, and political opportunities.  The Connected Learning report provides a number of case studies on how learning communities develop, and how intergenerational partnerships and mentoring programs can be really powerful for young people who might otherwise have limited opportunities for participation and mentorship.  The authors use the term “non-dominant youth” in the report instead of minority youth, diverse youth, or youth of color, explaining that “non-dominant explicitly calls attention to issues of power and power relations than do traditional terms to describe members of differing cultural groups” (Ito et al., p. 7).

While synthesizing a wide range of research on educational reform, the report also creates a space for ongoing conversation about the best ways to provide all children with opportunities to pursue their passions, and to do so with the support of peers, parents, and other caring adults.  In the spirit of that provocation, I’d like to continue the discussion sparked by the Connected Learning report, and talk about an example of connected learning that builds upon the cases described in the report.  Specifically, this example of connected learning centers on young people with disabilities, a group that adds another dimension to the discussion of “non-dominant youth.”  This “group” though is loosely defined as a category as disability takes many forms and intersects with issues of economic, cultural, and institutional equity in complex ways.

Augmentative and alternative communication devices as “new media”

I came across this particular case of connected learning this past weekend when I attended the annual Assistive Technology Institute in Costa Mesa, CA.  The one-day conference convened parents, teachers, therapists, and people with disabilities to discuss and learn about the latest in assistive technology services, tools, and products.  “Our goal,” states the Institute’s website, “is to help enhance opportunities for learners from preschool to adult in order that they may compete and contribute in the twenty-first century.”  I attended the conference as part of my ongoing research on how contemporary families incorporate new media and communication technologies into their homes, and in particular, families with children with disabilities.

“Assistive technology” (or AT for those unfamiliar with the term) is legislatively defined by the 1994 US Individuals with Disability Education Act as “any item, piece of equipment or product system whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized that is used to increase, maintain or improve functional capabilities of a child with a disability.”  At the conference, AT consultants Zebreda Dunham and Martin Sweeney offered up an alternative definition of AT, as “any thing or any tool that can make life easier and more productive for people with (or without) disabilities.”

One kind of AT is an augmentative and alternative communication (or AAC) device.  The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association defines AAC as “all forms of communication (other than oral speech) that are used to express thoughts, needs, wants, and ideas.”  There are many different types of AAC and many types of AAC users.  Some AAC relies on the users’ body to communicate (for example, sign language), while other AAC requires the use of tools or technological equipment in addition to the users’ body.  These “aided” forms of AAC can range from “no-tech” items such as paper and pencil to “high-tech” mobile devices that produce voice output.  The price range then for AAC can be mere cents or tens of thousands of dollars.  Some high-tech AAC devices are essentially portable computers with the sole purpose of providing AAC, while other AAC devices have other functions too (for example, iPads loaded with AAC apps).

People who use AAC need it because they have severe speech or language problems, and this includes people across the lifespan.  Adults and children may use AAC due to a developmental disability (e.g. autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy), an injury or illness that impacts their communication (e.g. stroke), or a progressive neurological condition (e.g. multiple sclerosis).  People who use AAC need different ways besides or in addition to oral speech to express themselves.

One way that AAC use is supported is through AAC user groups, which are meetings for people who use high-tech AAC devices to use them among one another.  Research indicates that AAC users can often feel isolated from others who communicate in the same manner, and that this lack of opportunity contributes along with many other factors to inconsistent AAC use and less social, cultural, and civic participation.  AAC users, young and old, tend to know few other AAC users.  For example, a child might be the only AAC user in his or her entire school, which has implications for their sense of belonging.

Disability and diversifying “connected learning”

Getting back to the issue of connected learning, one of the panels that I sat in on at the conference was entitled “The Mentoring Program: Adult AAC Users Mentoring Child AAC Users.”  Kathleen Rausch M.S. CCC-SLP, a speech-language pathologist at the Assistive Technology Exchange Center at Goodwill Industries of Orange County, CA, and Kim Vuong, an AAC user and mentoring program participant, presented the results of a recent pilot program: an AAC group that brought together adults and children who use high-tech AAC devices.

Intergenerational AAC groups are novel; such groups typically consist of either adult or children only for a number of reasons including topics of conversation and levels of parental involvement.  The mentoring program presented paired adults and children who use the same AAC device to communicate.  This pairing is important since AAC devices and systems can vary greatly.

Rausch and Vuong reported that the program provided adults and children in the group with opportunities for increased social engagement.  While the young AAC users enhanced their communication capabilities, the older AAC users gained mentoring skills.  Rausch and Vuong’s work, like the Connected Learning research, was about digital media and adults mentoring children in the pursuit of a common interest.  Work with children with special needs is notably underdeveloped within the growing body of Digital Media and Learning Hub research.  In a recent article in the International Journal of Learning and Media, Peppler and Warschauer (2012) point out that little attention has been paid to how children with disabilities, too often poorly served by educational systems, are marginalized from research on interest-driven learning, out-of-school learning, and learning with digital media.

This gap in the research not only omits the work of practitioners like Rausch and Vuong from the conversation on digital media and learning, but may actually be to the detriment of those generally interested in studying connected learning.  For example, in their presentation Rausch and Vuong discussed takeaways that while specific to a particular form of mentorship under the specific conditions of the AAC users group are highly relevant and generalizable to connected learning as a model:

• Perspective taking: The child and adult AAC users in the mentoring group, particularly those in wheelchairs, encountered differences in seat elevation that made one conversation partner unable to view the screen of the other person’s communication device.  It can be helpful for a conversation partner not only to hear the speech output coming from an AAC device, but also to see the visual symbols on the screen as well.  The interpersonal skill of “perspective taking” in this sense encompasses both the physical and the metaphorical.  In order for the adults and children in the AAC users group to engage in connected learning, they had to find common ground and learn how to share space in ways that are similar but also different from the examples of intergenerational perspective taking in the Connected Learning report.
• Adults are learners, too: Even proficient adult AAC users in the group did not always know how best to initiate and sustain communication exchanges with child AAC users.  While children and their parents gained more confidence about AAC through the program, the adults gained experience in mentoring and enjoyed leading activities with the children.  More generally, adults engaged in connected learning might be experts in certain skills or knowledgeable in particular areas, but learning to give appropriate help and feedback is part of adults’ learning process as well.
• Communities of practice:  The AAC users group provided children with unique opportunities to shape their identities.  The children had role models in and a shared purpose with the adult AAC users, role models that they can draw on to construct their sense of selves, both now and in the future.  It cannot be stressed how few the opportunities are for young AAC users to belong to such communities of expertise.

Conclusion

Young AAC users have complex communication needs, and thus need multiple points of entry and outreach to enter connected learning environments.  While advances in digital and mobile media have enabled a wider range of possibilities for meaningful communication among young people who use high-tech AAC device, these possibilities also exist among various institutional, educational, cultural, economic, and social constraints.  As the Connected Learning report notes, “Without a broader vision of social change […], new technologies will only serve to reinforce existing institutional goals and forms of social inequity” (Ito et al., p. 41).  As I’ve illustrated with my brief glimpse into the research presented at the Assistive Technology Institute on intergenerational AAC users groups, without a broader vision of connected learning itself, the current research agenda on new technologies will similarly isolate young people with disabilities from educational, economic, and political opportunities and prevent them from also competing and contributing in the twenty-first century and beyond.

References
Dunham, Zebreda, Martin Sweeney. Zen & the Art of No-Tech Assistive Technology. 2013. Presented at the Ninth Annual Assistive Technology Institute, Costa Mesa, CA.  http://www.zebredamakesitwork.com/trainings/

Ito, Mizuko, Kris Gutiérrez, Sonia Livingstone, Bill Penuel, Jean Rhodes, Katie Salen, Juliet Schor, Julian Sefton-Green, S. Craig Watkins. 2013. Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design. Irvine, CA: Digital Media and Learning Research Hub.

Peppler, Kylie A., Mark Warschauer. Uncovering Literacies, Disrupting Stereotypes: Examining the (Dis)Abilities of a Child Learning to Computer Program and Read. 2012. International Journal of Learning and Media, 3(3): 15-41.

The Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael H. Levine and Rafi Santo (Indiana University) have co-authored a chapter called “Upgrading Afterschool: Common Sense Shifts in Expanded Learning for a Digital Age” in the new book from the Expanding Learning & Afterschool Project. The compendium presents bold and persuasive evidence—as well as examples of effective practices, programs and partnerships—that demonstrates how summer and afterschool opportunities are yielding positive outcomes for authentic student, community and family engagement in learning. It features studies, reports and commentaries by more than 100 thought leaders including elected officials, educators, researchers, advocates and other prominent authors.

“Upgrading Afterschool” argues that expanded learning-time programs should emphasize participation in activities that let youth use their civic and collaborative skills as creators, makers, and innovators. The authors present principles for designing such programs and share recommendations for how to grow them.

The Upgrading Afterschool chapter is available online at the  Expanded Learning website.

The Facade of the East Harlem School. Photo: Eric Freeland.

A school is more than just a building. It’s an ecosystem, as delicate and as in need of balance as the ecosystems of the natural world. They way that a school is designed dictates the success of its mission to educate children and prepare them to become active and engaged citizens. To this end, teachers, administrators, architects, parents, concerned community members, and students themselves are innovating classroom design to create healthier environments conducive to effective learning.

The American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY) set out to find examples of schools that are built on the premise that physical design influences the learning process, or said another way, form informs function. The blurring of boundaries is happening in media, between work and home, and between public and private spaces. Societal and cultural trends heavily influence the systems in which children learn so it’s only natural that over time they would begin to influence the spaces where learning happens.

The AIA explores all of these concepts in its current exhibit, The Edgeless School: Design for Learning at the Center for Architecture located at 536 LaGuardia Place. The exhibit opened on October 1, 2012 and has been extended through May 25, 2013. It was organized in partnership with the AIANY Committee on Architecture for Education and the Center for Architecture Foundation.

The perfect curator
To bring this highly complex idea to life for a wide range of audiences—architects, educators, policy makers, parents, designers, and the general public—AIANY needed an empathic, seasoned curator. They found this rare combination in Thomas Mellins, an independent curator whose numerous credits include The New York Public Library’s Celebrating 100 Years exhibition and The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis at the Museum of the City of New York. Because they are so intricate, Thomas’s exhibits typically take 18 months to 2 years from concept to launch. This exhibit is no exception and required Thomas to also play the role of chief collaborator to bring together and lead a team of architects, designers, and education experts to create The Edgeless School.

The exhibit
The Edgeless School has a number of interlocking pieces that explore the varied aspects of the physical architecture and design of school buildings and how those designs influence the learning process.

Model schools
Thomas and the advisory board sifted through hundreds of potential schools to find the best examples of school designs that fundamentally changed the education experience for students, teachers, administrators, families, and communities. It was a Herculean effort and the team arrived at 19 schools that represent a mix of geographies, public, private, and magnet schools. These 19 model schools are showcased in storyboards with photographs and architectural plans as well as scale models. All the schools have been constructed in the past 7 years. These examples include The East Harlem School, which focuses its efforts on raising up the poorest students in its neighborhood with a “whole child” education philosophy, New Settlement Community Campus, which thoroughly integrates the community with the school in every facet including curriculum development, and L.B. Landry High School, which has a public community health clinic on its first floor for the express purpose of encouraging healthy living among its students.

Expert voices
In addition to the schools, the exhibit hosts a number of expert education voices throughout history. Educators like John Dewey and Maria Montessori broke from the highly structured German-based education models to form their own theories of how we can most effectively educate children. Today many education experts have taken the theories of people like Dewey and Montessori and adapted them for modern-day society with particular attention paid to the advancements in technology. These current voices are quite diverse and include people like Dale Dougherty, one of the co-founders of O’Reilly Media, founding editor and publisher of MAKE magazine, and co-creator of Maker Faire, and John Seely Brown, a researcher who specializes in organizational studies and is deeply entrenched in computer-supported activities and organizational learning.

Interior design and landscaping
The other main portion of the exhibit involves interior design including new innovations in classroom seating, the design of common spaces such as libraries and hallways where a great deal of informal learning takes place, and the development of outdoor spaces that serve as classrooms and living labs for subjects related to science.

Closing thoughts
Perhaps one of the most interesting and pressing debates around school design involves how to safely build bridges between schools and their communities. The concept for The Edgeless School exhibit happened long before Newtown and no one could have predicted this horrendous act and the intense debate it would spark in our country. Design is no small part of this conversation, and undoubtedly will be part of the solution as we strive to understand how we balance the idea of school as sanctuary with the need and desire for transparency and real-world experience.

Topics on education like this create the themes for the plethora of tangential events that are scheduled in conjunction with the exhibit. These programs are open to the public and encourage all of us interested in education to attend and lend our ideas. For a complete list of events as well as details about the exhibit, please visit http://www.aiany.org.

This Fall, I became the newest Cooney Center alum.  After completing my year-long stint as the 2011-2012 Cooney Center Research Fellow, I am now a post-doctoral fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.  Having had a few months to reflect on my Cooney Center fellowship, I have gained some perspective on what made it such a rewarding experience.  My first draft of this blog post was titled “The Top 100 Best Things About Being a JGCC Research Fellow,” but due to space considerations I was forced to cut it down to the Top 5 (note: feel free to contact me for the remaining 95 best things).  In no particular order, the five best things about being a JGCC Research Fellow are:

1. The mission
“How can digital media help children learn?”  While this may seem like a simple question to many, acquiring the answers is complex, largely incomplete, and absolutely critical to children’s education and well-being in the 21st century.

The mission of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center reflects precisely the reason I decided to pursue a career in children’s media research in the first place.  As an undergraduate Psychology major in 2003 I enrolled in Dr. Edward Palmer’s “Children and Televisual Media” class at Davidson College.  I realized then that children’s engagement with media constitutes another context through which children learn and develop—just as they are impacted by their experiences in home or school.  A position as a research assistant the following year brought me into the homes of many families from many varied circumstances throughout which I observed one constant presence: television.  I was struck by an epiphany that occurred to Joan Ganz Cooney decades ago: as there is perhaps no other resource to which children’s access and interest is so ubiquitous, television should be harnessed as a learning tool.

Ten years later we have witnessed an incredible revolution in digital technology—the “media context” of childhood has expanded to include cell phones, tablets, online social networks and virtual worlds, and video game devices that fit in the palm of your hand or can be operated without holding anything at all.  As these technologies enable increasingly interactive, anytime-anywhere media engagement for youth, they up the ante on our original mission.  Many different digital media are now being used by children in innumerable ways; how can they help children learn?

To spend a year working for an organization built around addressing this essential question, alongside others drawn to pursue the same goals, was truly a dream realized for me.  The most rewarding moments of my fellowship were those in which I felt I was using my own knowledge and training to contribute towards the Cooney Center’s fundamental mission.

2.     Getting pushed outside your comfort zone
While the Cooney Center’s mission was one dear to my heart, its methods were, at times, somewhat unfamiliar to me.  What resulted was an unparalleled opportunity to learn and advance my research and writing skills.  Joining the Center directly from graduate school, I was accustomed to writing for academics.  Learning to convey important research questions and findings to parents, policymakers, media producers, via blogs, reports, and white papers, was an accomplishment of which I am particularly proud.  The specific design of the Cooney Center and its independence as a “research and innovation lab” means that its ultimate stakeholders are children and families.  As such, uncovering and disseminating key information to diverse audiences that are poised to make the most differences in the media children consume and the ways in which they consume it is what the Cooney Center does best.

 3. The creative and supportive environment
Being pushed outside of one’s comfort zone is particularly appealing when it occurs in a setting teeming with creative energy and replete with talented researchers, writers, producers, and Muppets!  As a Cooney Center Research Fellow I was constantly exposed to new ways of thinking about the role of digital media in children’s lives, while simultaneously provided access to individuals on the frontlines of children’s media research, design, and production with invaluable perspectives to offer.  I sat in on Sesame Street curriculum seminars as writers, researchers, producers, and outside child development experts met to discuss aspects of the next season’s program. I traded insights and intriguing questions about children’s e-books with the Sesame Worldwide Publishing team.  I attended a meeting with representatives from JGCC, the Sesame Innovation Lab, Nokia, and AARP to discuss mutual interests in helping children and remote grandparents connect and learn together via digital media.  And these are only a few examples.  Spending the year in such a creative environment, with so much support from my Cooney Center colleagues and others in the Workshop was a top highlight for me.

4.     The flexibility to pursue varied interests
Surrounded by so many creative opportunities daily, it may seem a wonder that I sat still long enough to get anything done during my fellowship.  In fact, back in the world of academia, I am amazed at all I was able to accomplish during my year at the Cooney Center.  In addition to the incredible support and guidance I received from my JGCC colleagues and other mentors, these accomplishments are owed to the flexibility Cooney Center Fellows are given to pursue what interests them.

In the early days of my fellowship, while helping to collect research for our QuickStudy line of research, I was bitten by the e-book bug.  Executive Director Michael Levine and Research Director Lori Takeuchi worked with me to pursue this interest via a large-scale survey that queried parents about their attitudes and use of e-books with their children.  When I mentioned my curiosity about how e-books and other tablet apps were being used to teach children with developmental disabilities, they encouraged me to visit the Mary Cariola Children’s Center and write a series of blog posts about what I had learned there.  This interest continues to thrive, and I have plans for an experimental study regarding children’s e-book underway.

5.     The people!
One thing that made my year as a Fellow particularly special was getting to work with the Cooney Center team.  Though the staff is small, they are, to a person, dedicated to the mission of the Center.  The team is comprised of members who are innovative, hardworking, and always supportive and encouraging.  My Cooney Center colleagues strive tirelessly to enrich the lives and learning of youth through their efforts to understand and advance the educational potential of digital media; getting to join their ranks has been a true joy for me.

These and many other aspects of the fellowship made my year at the Cooney Center one of the most productive, rewarding, educational, and fun experiences in my life.  Did they say the application came out today?  I think I may just apply again…