One morning last summer in DeRidder, Louisiana, Angel Acevedo-Martinez’s father came into his room and woke him up with exciting news. Angel’s 6th grade math teacher, Miss Sanchez was on the phone to tell him that his game, The Arcade, had been chosen as a winner in the National STEM Video Game Challenge in Washington, DC. Before that spring, Angel had never designed a game of his own, and now here he was, an award winner in a national competition! Angel’s parents were incredibly proud of him and his little sister was jumping up and down celebrating, but when Angel heard the news, his end of the phone went completely silent.

Was Angel speechless in shock? Nope – he was still half asleep! “I had to explain to my teacher when school started again that I really was excited!” says Angel, a soon to be 13 year-old night owl who LOVES to stay up late at night (especially in the summer!) and wasn’t expecting an 8am phone call that day.

Angel Acevedo-Martinez started creating video games last year, in his math class for gifted students. His teacher introduced her students to Gamestar Mechanic and the group of about a dozen students had the chance to design their own games during their block class throughout the semester. When asked about getting started making video games, Angel explains, “Well whenever I played games I had always thought these are really cool, I think I’d like to be a game designer!”  Over the semester, Angel created The Arcade, a game made up of an impressive number of 20 challenging mini games.

Angel looked to existing games to get his creative juices flowing and brainstorm ideas for all of those mini games. He started playing video games when he was about 7 years-old, and loves playing games like Animal Crossing, classics like Mertroid on Nintendo Land, other games made by kids on Gamestar Mechanic (especially adventure games) and lately, LEGO City Undercover. When playing other designer’s games, Angel values good storytelling and variety – many of the games he enjoys require managing various missions or relationships but he also likes, “a story that I can understand and go along with.” In addition to coming up with ideas for his games on his own, Angel also credits his 10 year-old sister with inspiring a lot of the ideas for mini games in The Arcade. Laughing, he exclaims, “she comes up with crazy ideas!!”

Angel also had some great playtesters to help him test out his games. Miss Sanchez’s entire gifted math class works on games for the challenge as their Spring event each year, and the students help each other out using “a system where we switched computers and played each others’ games for 5 minutes. Then we would leave comments on a piece of paper saying what we thought.” As the class, and other young designers around the country get ready for the next National STEM Video Game Challenge, Angel has a few pieces of advice:

• Play lots of other games and look at what you like about them to get ideas but then get creative to make it different and new

• Get lots of feedback from other players

• Keep changing your game around to make it fun and challenging

To design a game with the amount of challenge he suggests, “a game is too easy if you get through on first try. But, if it’s too hard, you won’t be able to get through it at all. So you need it to be where you need to get it in a few tries – it can’t be frustrating for the player but at the end they can’t think that it wasn’t enough either.” But ultimately, Angel knows if he’s made a good game when he enjoys playing it and sees other people enjoying themselves too.

So, what will we see next from Angel Acevedo-Martinez? As his 7th grade class goes into 2014, they will begin to look at other programs like Scratch to continue programming games. Although they have not focused on games to teach skills like math as a part of class yet, Angel thinks “that sounds very interesting.” When he’s not designing games in math class, Angel might be found making exploding “elephant toothpaste” in Chemistry (his favorite subject), taking care of his awesome miniature Schnauzer, Bosco, or going out to movies with his friends. Someday he might become a professional game designer, a zookeeper, or because he already has a great signature for it, a doctor!

So for anyone reading this post thinking about whether or not to get involved in game design competitions like the National STEM Video Game Challenge, I’ll leave you with some encouraging words from Angel, one of this year’s inspiring winners:

“… totally do it! It’s fun and it doesn’t even matter if you win or not – you still have something fun that you can play because you did it yourself and you should be really proud.”

The London Educational Games Meetup group (or LEGup, as it’s become known), was started just over two years ago by Kirsten Campbell Howes, an educational specialist and game designer. At first, it was a small gathering in a room above a pub, where a few like-minded games makers and enthusiasts would show what they were working on, ask for feedback, and share their experiences. Two years later, LEGup has nearly 800 members (including games developers, teachers, investors and others), has outgrown the pub and acquired another organizer (me). Clearly, there is something interesting going on in educational games: an explosion of interest and activity.

Photo from London Educational Meetup Group

Kirsten and I realized that part of the reason for LEGup’s success was that it was pretty much the only organization running meetups on this subject and that learning games makers were in general poorly served for resources and information. Furthermore, since many were working in small teams, or on their own, they were keen to learn from others and get advice on areas that they knew less about, often about marketing or the business aspects. To help meet this need, we launched a new website in June for educational games-makers, edugameshub.com.

It feels like we’re in the middle of an exciting time for the scene in the UK. We’ve had some great success stories amongst members. Nightzookeeper, a creativity game and set of apps, won a highly competitive place at the Wayra start up accelerator last year. Zondle, a site that allows teachers to create their own learning games, has gone from 120,000 to 450,000 registered users in the last year. Our members also include Cowly Owl, Frosby Apps, Interface3, Preloaded, Thoughtden and many more who’ve produced some really beautiful, engaging and popular learning games for all ages. And investors are starting to take notice, another start-up accelerator looking specifically at educational technology has just launched, the Emerge Venture Lab and they have expressed a keen interest in getting game based learning projects involved.

However, it’s not all smooth sailing. Educational game developers here face a number of critical challenges, and many are finding it tough to create sustainable businesses. The main issues are:

• As mentioned above, many games developers are only in small outfits or working totally solo, and may find they don’t have all the skills necessary without the money to hire in more expertise.

• Creating good educational games can be hard! Getting the balance between learning and fun right is a mix of real skill and a bit of luck.

• Getting games into schools is really difficult. Teachers don’t have huge budgets, and don’t have much time. Many are also yet to be convinced about the value of games based learning.

• So it makes sense to target parents, but the sheer number of educational apps and games that are now out there make it hard to rise above the competition. The most obvious route is via the App Store, but you are basically at the mercy of Apple’s editorial decisions about which app to feature or not.

• There is still only a small pool of funding and investment available. The Technology Strategy Board recently ran an open competition for games but this sort of funding is few and far between.

• Outside of LEGup and edugameshub there are few opportunities for knowledge sharing between games developers, and especially between academics working in this field and practitioners. Kirsten and I wrote this blog post recently for NESTA that goes into more detail about this issue.

Mindful of both the potential and the challenges, NESTA (formerly the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) has recently launched a digital education blog series and kicked it off with an event on “Game-Science and Game-Based Learning: Bringing Education to Life” that I was invited to join the panel for.

It was a fascinating event and discussion. Given the amount of interest in this area, it wasn’t surprising to see that the room was packed, and the questions were all thought-provoking. Why aren’t we learning from previous research and projects on games based learning? How can we provide better evidence for the efficacy of using educational games? What about non-digital games in the classroom? How can we convince the government to provide support to this industry?

We may not have agreed on what the answers were to all those questions, but it was great to see the conversation moving on and getting stuck into some of the real issues. I hope that edugameshub can work with Nesta and also games industry bodies such as UKIE to find solutions to some of these challenges and help support all these brilliant games makers. It’s certainly an interesting time to be working in this area, so watch this space!

Martha Henson is a freelance digital producer and co-Director of edugameshub.com, a newly-launched online resource and global community of educational games makers. Edugameshub is the sister website to #LEGup, the London Educational Games Meetup Group, which now has over 700 members, all interested in creating, using, teaching with, or even investing in learning games of all sorts.

This post was originally published on the Fred Rogers Center Blog and appears here with permission.

This week my colleagues at Education Development Center and SRI International and I are releasing findings from our Prekindergarten Transmedia Mathematics Study. This research is part of Ready to Learn, a partnership between the US Department of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and PBS. The basic premise of Ready to Learn is that it marshals public media resources in support of 2- to 8-year-olds from traditionally under-resourced communities, who are often less prepared for school than are their more socially and economically advantaged peers. After focusing on literacy and school readiness for a good many years, in 2010 the initiative began exploring how transmedia could support math learning, as early math achievement is a strong predictor of later school achievement. Think Cat in the Hat’s Huff-Puff-A-Tron on the front lines fighting against the achievement gap.

Of course we’d be over the moon if everyone would read our study’s full report but here’s the skinny on our main findings for those with limited time:

• The important math skills measured—counting; subitizing; recognizing numerals; recognizing, composing, and representing shapes; and patterning—increased significantly for the study’s four- and five-year-old children.
• Preschool teachers who enacted the PBS KIDS Transmedia Math Supplement reported significant changes in their confidence and comfort with early mathematics concepts and teaching with technology.

In other words, kids learned math and teachers grew more confident teaching math, which is what one would expect to happen when classrooms are equipped with high-end technologies, such as interactive whiteboards and laptop computers, and when teachers are encouraged to use high-quality free content featuring popular characters like Curious George and Sid the Science Kid.

But the study wasn’t an isolated test of shiny new hardware and content; instead, it sought to understand math learning and teaching in real classrooms—92 of them in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. As required by the Department of Education, the study was a randomized controlled trial and it followed a three-condition design:

• A third of the classrooms received a PBS KIDS Transmedia Math Supplement, which included: PBS KIDS Lab videos and games; nondigital materials, like books and foam shapes; interactive white boards and laptop computers; broadband internet access; and on-demand technical support. Teachers also received pre-study training and ongoing coaching support focused on the enactment of the supplement.
• A third of the classrooms were equipped with the exact same technology resources, and teachers received similar levels of training as well as tech and math support but the support was not organized around a sequenced curricular supplement.
• And a third of the classrooms kept doing what they always do; this is what researchers commonly refer to as “business as usual.”

The positive findings—children learning significantly more math and teachers expressing greater comfort with technology and confidence in their math teaching—flow from a comparison of the first with the third group. The second group, which received an infusion of digital resources, did not experience measurable gains in math learning. Put another way: air-dropping technology into centers serving young children, even with modest levels of support, was insufficient. The report has an expanded description of why we think this was the case but here’s the gist of our conclusion:

• A sharp, cohesive curricular focus adds potency to a common approach to technology integration, which tends toward the general and aspirational and often leaves teachers to select resources piecemeal and on their own.
• Conversely, when teachers are prepared with the content knowledge and pedagogical experience needed to mediate children’s learning with technology, children are able to make use of the learning opportunities available through engagement with digital media.
• Digital transmedia’s potential to advance content-area learning for young children may be of greatest value for those children who are most in need of academic support. The shorthand version of this goes like this: “The children who have the most to gain are the ones who gain the most.”

Despite calls for more and stronger mathematics for young children, particularly with the introduction of the Common Core Standards, there are few preschool math curricula and even fewer that have been tested. Likewise, many existing methods for teaching early mathematics simply aren’t delivering, especially for kids from lower income households and English learners. That we were able to find positive results with a 10-week supplement indicates the promise of well-sequenced digital assets when combined with teacher supports, perhaps making a modest contribution to those wishing to understand young children’s mathematics learning. We invite everyone to ask us questions about any of the elements of this study from the selection of transmedia resources to the model of teacher support. Get in touch at our website.

Next up for our Ready to Learn research team: the transmedia of Peg + Cat and math learning at home…

Play-I is developing Bo and Yana, robots that teach kids five and older some of the the basic concepts behind programming. Using a visual programming interface that weaves  music, stories, and animation, children are encouraged to think strategically with if-then statements that guide the robots along.  The robots are expected to ship in summer 2014. In this guest post, Play-I CEO Vikas Gupta explains how even the youngest kids can learn to program through playful exploration.

You’re given a sequence of commands. “Go straight, turn right, turn left, and turn right.” Where are you now? It can be hard for children (and even adults) to figure out where they are after following such a sequence. Because your position changes at each step, you need to mentally keep track of where you are as you go along. And as the sequence grows, you need to keep track of more and more context.

For children, abstract sequences in programming are difficult to grasp. But the idea of a sequence becomes more accessible when provided within a context that is already familiar. Music, stories, and puppeteering are examples of ways to engage children in computer programming using concrete concepts they are already familiar with.

At Play-i, our goal is to make computer programming accessible and fun for children as young as 5 years old. We are developing a pair of robots, Bo & Yana, which can help children see the physical manifestations of their programs. These robots can be programmed using iOS and Android touch devices including tablets and phones.

Music

When you play or sing a song, you are retelling a very long sequence composed of notes and pauses. This type of sequence is easy for kids to understand because each step is woven into a narrative that makes intuitive sense.

Bo is a robot that can move around, express character using sounds and lights, and respond to a number of external stimuli. Using a tablet with the app, a child can program Bo to navigate a maze like a self-driving car, play soccer, and even play music.

Bo plays the xylophone
Photo courtesy of Play-i

The app will come with pre-programmed tracks with songs such as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Jingle Bells.”  Music provides a structure that children are familiar with, and programming movements along with a song introduces concepts such as parallelism. For instance, children can program the robot to smile, blink, or dance during the performance. Children can then start composing their own songs and looking under the hood to see the code that runs the program.

Puppeteering

We developed a concept called puppeteering because we wanted children to be able to work backwards to discover how programs are created.

Say you send Bo to your mom’s room to deliver a flower. If you use your hand to guide it along the floor, Bo remembers the path and can execute that function on its own the next time you call it. The app can ask something like “Do you want to see how I did that?” and show the step Bo took to get there.

If you want the robot to go forward and turn right, most children will say “forward forward forward, then right right right” because that seems intuitive. But as they puppeteer the robot and then look at the steps the robot took, they realize that the robot went forward, turned right, and then went forward again.

Bo might then ask you to use a sequence of steps to surprise your brother. You cannot puppeteer anymore, because the surprise would be ruined. So you are prompted to create the sequence in advance to get him there. Children will use the concepts they learned while puppeteering to make a plan, create a sequence, and think ahead strategically.

Stories

Children are capable of understanding and telling stories of an amazing amount of complexity. Even two-year-olds can tell stories with intricate plot lines and characters woven in and out without getting lost.

When we asked children what they wanted Bo to do — they often wanted Bo to fly, to be a spaceship, to be a helicopter, or be a lion or a dinosaur. We found that children gravitate to “characters” they see in the world around them. This study led to the creation of Yana.

Yana can be anything you imagine
Photo courtesy of Play-i

Yana can express a character using sound and lights. The eye’s animation along with colors can express emotions. Yana is small and light enough for small hands to hold, spin, shake, catch and more.

Using a simple visual interface, children can start building characters in the context of stories and books they may already be reading. Take Good Night Moon, for instance, in which each page contains simple characters. As they turn the pages, it is very easy for children to follow along and even remember what comes next. Similarly, you can program a series of if-then statements that Yana can respond to based on gestures. On the first page, Yana might be programmed to ring like a telephone when you shake it; on the second page it moos like a cow when you tap it; on the third page it growls like a bear when you throw it. And so on.

Slowly, even in the absence of a book or a story, children can start to tell new stories by programming new sequences of characters.

We are introducing programming in very concrete ways to give children a context for understanding theoretical concepts. Programming concepts are introduced one at a time through vivid storytelling and interactive quests that adjust to their learning style and pace.

Through inquiry and exploration, repetition and reinforcement, they will truly grasp the underlying concepts. The possibilities are as vast as their imaginations.

Vikas Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of Play-i. Prior to founding Play-i, Vikas had founded Jambool, which was acquired by Google in 2010. Vikas served as Head of Consumer Payments at Google until 2012. Before Jambool, Vikas worked at Amazon where he led the payments and web services initiatives. Vikas studied Computer Science at IIT Kanpur and Georgia Tech. He is also a dad of a 2 year old, and an avid traveler and  hiker.

Photo courtesy of Toca Boca

Since the beginning of Toca Boca, we’ve always tried to invent new ways of playing with screens. Some come very naturally—like creative play—where the touchscreen device gives kids super powers for their creations. Other areas are a little more abstract and take some more thinking. In this more challenging category, we have Toca Builders, which addresses construction play. How can we use a flat 2D touchscreen to help kids create and play with models and patterns?

From an adult’s perspective, pure construction can often be quite linear. First you need to decide what you want to build, then you need to plan the process, figure out how to combine techniques to get there, and then finish the project. For kids, the process of “constructing” is not necessarily structured in such an orderly fashion. Construction play can encompass a lot of exploring and experimenting, and doesn’t need to be a linear process with a predetermined outcome. On the contrary, the ability to build freely can provide a more creative challenge as opposed to following an engineering ditto. The journey is the destination, as they say.

In order to create a digital toy that enables this kind of creative freedom, we wanted to make sure that the app was not in the way of this journey. It needed to facilitate and inspire as opposed to frustrate and limit. A key challenge was the user interface. It serves two purposes in this case: first it needs to enable kids to do what they are intending to do, and it needs to be easy to understand. We wanted to avoid Photoshop-esque menus or abstract icons representing tools that may mean something for adults but nothing for kids. Secondly—since the app is so open ended—we could also use the interface as some scaffolding in terms of showing what could be done in the app. It is a big 3D world where anything could be built, but where should the kids start? Let the interface serve as some inspiration! To spark an idea that might not have been there when they opened the app. This is an unusual choice, as most of you who use software on a daily basis know. The menus in Microsoft Outlook don’t exactly inspire you to write great emails.

Image courtesy of Toca Boca

The team solved this challenge by essentially removing the user interface from a traditional perspective. Instead, they created characters for each specific construction technique. The app has Cooper the Ball, who paints the ground by rolling around on a ball covered in paint; Vex the Jumper builds vertically and Blox the Hammer builds horizontally and can remove blocks too. There are six characters altogether.

Now it may sound counter-intuitive to have characters as an interface, but the fact is that this works surprisingly well for our young builders. Instead of thinking about which buttons to press in order to create a certain effect, kids can identify themselves with certain characters and the construction powers they have. If they want to repaint a structure, they don’t have to look through a menu to find the “repainting button” but instead, remember that Jum Jum the Painter can shoot paint from a long distance to make something a different color. In essence, the player becomes each character for brief periods of time and by that, the question of how to create something is suddenly solved. The app removes the abstraction that a traditional menu would introduce and moves straight into identification instead.

The characters also serve as some scaffolding within the app, in that you can explore and have fun with each character without explicitly trying to build something. Playing with the characters in a free form way provides a starting point and can inspire an idea of something to create. Or for that matter—just keep playing without a specific intention. The point of the app is to have fun first and foremost, and the notion of constructing something specific should never stand in the way. For this reason, there are no explicit challenges to solve or high scores for building certain things. In this sense, it is similar to LEGO—you can have plans to build something very specific, but it is just as fun to just play with it in any way you like. This stays true to our philosophy of making toys and not games.

Additional scaffolding and inspiration comes through the randomized pre-built worlds that appear in the app from time to time. These pre-constructed worlds can serve as a playground to have fun with, as the first blocks to add to, or just as something exciting and pretty to look at. It also adds the element of surprise, which is always fun.

The version of Toca Builders that is in the App Store today is the third prototype that the team made. In many ways, making the app was a journey without a clear destination too. The original title was Toca Inventions; the team gradually iterated from that point forward, finally leading up to the product that you can play with today. From the beginning, we knew that it was going to be about construction, and we knew that it had to be fun. After that it was trying to facilitate the fun and getting the app out of the way so kids can create. Designing our six little Builders to help out with this process is one of the more elegant design choices we’ve made, I think.

The team behind Toca Builders was:

Mårten Brüggemann – Play Designer
Emil Berner – Art Director
Erik Olsson – Developer
Emil Ovemar – Producer

Björn Jeffery is the CEO and Co-Founder of Toca Boca, a play studio that makes digital toys for touchscreen devices. Since 2011, it has released 17 digital toy apps that are played in more than 150 countries. The apps carry consistently high ratings on the App Store and have totaled more than 32 million downloads to date. Toca Boca is a part of The Bonnier Group, one of Europe’s largest media groups with interests in books, newspapers, magazines, television, internet and film. Mr. Jeffery is currently based in San Francisco at the company’s U.S. headquarters.

The technology available to the youngest children is evolving rapidly, according to the results of a new survey from Common Sense Media.

The survey of more than 1400 parents of children 8 and younger found access to mobile devices and time spent on those devices had increased dramatically from the last survey done two years ago.

See full infographic at Common Sense Media

Common Sense Media produced an infographic that has the highlights of the survey.

According to some within Common Sense Media, the results should be seen as a wakeup call to parents and educators.

“Understanding what kids are using, how they’re using it, and how much time they spend on it can help lead to better products, better parenting, and better public policies,” Caroline Knorr, Common Sense Media’s parenting editor, blogged about the results. “Media can have a profound effect—both positive and negative—on kids. If a 2-year-old can swipe a screen, we owe it to kids to create media and technology that maximizes the positives.”

This was the second time the group has conducted this study. The first was completed in 2011.