Panelists Anna Ly, Leshell Hatley, Brianna Igbinosun, Jennifer Groff, Patrice King from Creating Youth Builders – Promoting a New Game Design Ecosystem to Engage Hard-to-Reach Youth in Learning

This year, I had the great privilege to attend the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, where I had organized a panel called “Creating Youth Builders – Promoting a New Game Design Ecosystem to Engage Hard-to-Reach Youth in Learning.” The heavy hitters on the panel included Jennifer Groff, a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and the VP of Learning for the Learning Games Network, Ricarose Roque, a PhD student with the Scratch Team at the MIT Media Lab, Leshell Hatley, Founder and Executive Director of Uplift, Inc., Brianna Igbinosun, a high school student who won the Best Scratch High School Game in the 2013 National STEM Video Game Challenge, and Patrice King, one of the Co-Founders of Hidden Level Games. During the 90-minute session, panelists discussed their existing methods of engaging hard-to-reach youth, including workshops that focus on inter-generational learning and students of color.

Here are some insights from the session on how to really engage these students productively:

• Organizers should set the students up to speak to each other. Given that all the participants come from various backgrounds and may differ in experience, students might find it intimidating to try to get ideas across without fearing judgment.
• Encourage instructors to overcome their doubts about whether or not they could teach or relate to the kids. As one panelist pointed out, “They are just kids!”
• Barriers to entry must be low and must be marketed as such to catch participants’ attention.
• Parent engagement is huge – leverage them to encourage consistent attendance, have them participate in the workshops themselves, and keep them informed.
• Incorporate research and set aside time for observation to improve the program over time. Panelists spoke about how their curricula was not only based on educational methodologies and research on using game design to learn but also made sure to document lessons learned throughout the program.
• Utilize instructors that are slightly older or who were formerly in the program. Though it might be difficult to sustain them over time, they will provide valuable advice for improving the program, will have a strong familiarity with the material and teaching style, and can serve as peer mentors.

One recurring issue that was brought up during the session was hardware. The panelists collectively agreed that if a program doesn’t have access to the proper hardware, game design methods can still be taught with paper and pencil. Check out the panelists’ programs to download materials:

• www.learninggamesnetwork.org
• http://www.upliftdc.org/classes.html
• http://day.scratch.mit.edu/resources
• http://betathegame.gamepedia.com/

Panelists Kevin Miklasz, Rik Paganiban, and Anna Ly (L to R) from Developing STEM Literacy through Game Play and Game Design

The other session I was a part of was “Developing STEM Literacy through Game Play and Game Design.” During the conversation, organizer Barry Joseph, Associate Director for Digital Learning at the American Museum of Natural History, engaged all of us in a discussion around game-based learning and its potential in teaching STEM content and practices like scientific reasoning and design skills. Afterwards, each of the panelists presented the games that we were working on with our respective institutions: I got to speak about Elemental, a video game for children ages 7-11 that aims to improve “number sense,” or a person’s innate ability for number estimation.

Throughout the session, attendees were eager to understand how kids feel about learning in games and to what extent do we as game developers show them this value. In response, there was a heated discussion about how learning and fun should go hand in hand rather than in completely separate buckets. Though some may think that all fun and play will not bode well for learning, when being challenged and overcoming problems successfully, players will find that intrinsically fun itself. The audience was also eager to hear more about designing games around specific curricula, games as a tool for assessment, low-hanging fruit for educational games, and research-based games. You can hear more about our responses in the video below.

These issues were also a running theme throughout the whole conference. One panel, “Doing ‘Good’ Game Design” with Jesse Schell of Schell Games, Richard Tate of Hope Labs, Jessica Berlinski of If You Can, and Tanner Higgin of Common Sense Media, discussed several research-based games that targeted more high-hanging fruit – shaping attitudes and behaviors and providing kids with skills for productive and healthy living. At one point, Jesse Schell spoke about how socio-emotional learning games are difficult to create because above-the-neck mechanics like thinking and speaking are much harder to design for compared to below-the-neck mechanics like running and jumping. Jessica Berlinski provided details on their process and how they aligned the game with Illinois’s Socio-Emotional State Standards, the only State Standards for that content area. One takeaway that resonated with me was Jesse’s comment that the art of all entertainment is to get someone to care about something that’s not initially important to them. Empathy is essentially embedded in games and part of the groundwork for engaging and fun games.

Of course, this is just a tidbit of all the bubbling conversations that happened at the conference. For more details and recordings of many of the sessions, go to to DML 2014 website: dml2014.dmlhub.net. You can also read more about our session Developing STEM Literacy through Gameplay and Game Design on the following blog post: http://www.mooshme.org/2014/03/dml2014-wrap-up-developing-stem-literacy-through-gameplay-and-game-design/

This post originally appeared on gamesandlearning.org.

Björn Jeffery: “For me, complaining about App Store search is pointless because it is what it is. This is the environment I am going to place myself in and if I don’t like it than I probably shouldn’t be in there.”

Toca Boca has emerged as one of the most significant kids producer in the mobile app space. The Swedish-based company has about two dozen apps that have been downloaded 65 million times — and those are paid downloads.

The company has found a sweet spot building consumer-facing apps for children that can be sold across the world.

Despite their prowess in the App Store, the company is not eyeing the American school market.

“If I were to try and do it by the book at a state level, it would require four or five or six times as much work and I would be cutting off 50 percent of my total market. I would be losing all the other countries because Saudi Arabia doesn’t teach the same way as Nevada does,” Björn Jeffrey, the founder and CEO of Toca Boca, said.

Listen to the full conversation:

The following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

gamesandlearning.org: What are the big things you will take away from SXSWedu?

Björn Jeffrey: I think one of the big things that comes across at the conference is how many people have it as synonymous education and children. They are almost completely the same thing in this context almost ignoring the rest of childhood in a way.

They’re a lot of references to education being the solution to all of children’s problems in a way…

I would have thought there would be a bigger sort of take on how technology, or how adults in general, can help children develop, not necessarily only educate them…

gamesandlearning.org:  Is that something that you run into even in what Toca Boca does. I mean, you get asked is what you’re building educational, is it a learning game, is it just a game, is it a digital toy? It sounds almost semantic, but how important are these issues?

Björn Jeffrey: There’s an element of semantics to it, but I also think the phrasing of it… It frames the question a lot. So when I say, “I make apps for children.” Then they say, “Oh, you make educational apps.” That’s the first comment. And actually they’re not educational necessarily.

The assumption here is anything for children would be educational and, if not, why not? Why wouldn’t it be educational because that would obviously be better.

My argument would be: education is great and it has its place, but there are other things we can do for children other than just educate them.  Just looking at learning from a broader sense, there are things you can learn, and that you can teach for that matter, that are not from a strict curriculum perspective — things like collaborating or using your imagination or being creative. There’s a place for that in an educational context but they are also things that can be just learned from doing completely different things…

Even in the App Store, all the apps are in the education category because that is where parents look for children’s products. Now are they, then, educational because they are in the education category? Not necessarily and looking at most of the apps, most probably not. This creates a very confusing environment for everyone. What am I actually getting?

I think most parents just look for – I want something that my kids like and I wouldn’t mind if it were something that was good for them either. But distilling exactly what’s what there is a very confusing thing and I think the labels of it is one part of the problem…

gamesandlearning.org: Have you seen an evolution in the way your customers think about it?

Björn Jeffrey: There are some who have been using apps for several years they are getting a little bit more used to what to look for…

It’s quite difficult still with discovery broadly – how do I find a great app for my kids, no matter what I am looking for – educational or whatever? How do I find a filter or an editor or a curator or something like that that can point me in the right direction? And at the moment it is almost only the platforms themselves…

In general, if you are looking for great apps which are not awful – which seems like a reasonable question to ask – your options are pretty limited.

gamesandlearning.org: Is your strategy to say, “Rather than to have one or two giant hits, I want to build a regular audience that looks to me as almost like their curator because they know me as a producer, they know me as a brand?”

Björn Jeffrey: We made a bet on a brand as opposed to a single product which means we make smaller singular experiences that are under the same sort of umbrella. So they are all Toca something – Toca Hair Salon, Toca Kitchen, Toca Store. And now we have this wide portfolio of different kinds of themes and play patterns, but they’re all under the same Toca Boca umbrella. They’re named in the same way.

The reason for that is once parents find something that they really like, finding something new – again based on the discoverability issues – is really hard… A lot of them just search for Toca Boca and see what’s new from them because that was good the last time and that solves a lot of it.

Searching for a brand and then finding a wide range of things, akin to how an uncle or an auntie are like, “I’ll buy something from Lego. That will be great.” What in the Lego catalogue is almost less important. It’s more like Lego is normally good. That’s a safe bet… I can trust it.

What’s good about that is it’s good for consumers because it is an easier way to distill what’s good or not. It’s good for developers because it keeps us on our toes because if you buy something from us or from Lego that’s really bad than you are going to think twice before going back. So that means the pressure is on that every product that you make has to be as good or better than the expectations of your customers.

gamesandlearning.org: Did this strategy evolve or was it how you planned to operate?

Björn Jeffrey:  This was actually planned. It was planned because we spent several months both looking at exactly what kind of product we were going to do but also studying the App Store.

So, Toca Boca is a company designed around the App Store which is different than a lot of others that had a product maybe on a CD-ROM before or had it on the web… and then decided maybe we’ll make a mobile version of what we already have. Now we took that in a different direction to saying, “If we were to design children’s products for the App Store today, how would they need to look? How would they need to be branded?” All of those sort of questions came up from an App Store perspective.

For me, complaining about App Store search is pointless because it is what it is.  This is the environment I am going to place myself in and if I don’t like it than I probably shouldn’t be in there. So instead we tried to play that to our advantage.

gamesandlearning.org: Have you looked at freemium? Are there alternatives to the Toca Boca strategy?

Björn Jeffrey: We’ve looked at it because you have to. Everything is going to freemium, especially for adults. The perceptions of adults going to the App Store and buying something for themselves also highly affects how they view children’s products. I do think parents are generally speaking a little more generous to their kids than they are to themselves – they are willing to spend more money for their kids apps than for their own.  But when you know the level of quality app you get for free for yourself that changes your perception of what’s worth paying for then?… The perception from parents changes things a lot so you have to be aware of what you are doing anyway.

I think there is a good and a bad way of doing freemium for children. I think it is possible to do it well. It is not something we are going to be doing but I think there are developers who are doing it in a nice way.

A few sort of guidelines for me anyway is not having consumables, so buying add-on packs as opposed to virtual currency. I think virtual currency is quite a deceitful way of playing with children’s perception of money. Arguably a lot of adults have trouble deciphering how 100 gems is actually worth, but kids certainly do. So that is one thing: no consumables.

Placing sales outside of the game play and selling it in a separate store. And then having the right sort of parental locks and things in place.

So I think given those pre-requisites, it’s possible to do but you need to know that being successful in freemium is something very different than being successful in the paid market. The people spending a lot of money in freemium – and given the caveats I just listed – how much is left? How much money can actually be made from freemium?

It’s not you just add an in-app purchase to your app and the money starts flowing in… Being successful with freemium almost requires that you to design from the freemium model from the beginning. It’s not something you can apply later. I’m starting with freemium and then I am building a game on top of the freemium business model. That’s when you are really successful.

The mistake I have seen done many times is people have a game in the kids space or in the adult space and then they add freemium as an afterthought and then you are just left with basically no business model at all. It’s free so you’re making no money up front but you’re also not selling anything in it. It’s a very tricky thing.

gamesandlearning.org: Is too much being made of making educational games for the classroom?

Björn Jeffrey:  …The difficulty with the original software or the educational software is although it is technically correct from a curriculum point of view, it’s not very fun. The kids don’t like it. Even if it does what it should be doing, if kids don’t use it then there is no educating being done. It becomes almost a hypothetical idea then, if they were to play this game all the way through then yes, indeed, the outcome of that would be that they had learned X,Y and Z. But then you have to be a little more pragmatic. Well, do they play the game all the way through? Does anyone want to play this at all? Does this muster any enthusiasm?…

You’ve got to build a really, really good game or a really, really good toy for kids to really like it and engage in that. If there is not engagement and there is no usage than there is no educating anyway and that, I think, a lot of people here miss. They are so focused on the game being super correct from an educational standards that you almost forget about the kids…

I don’t think it is a misguided discussion. I think it is a fair point to make, but if you are more pragmatic and you generally care about kids actually learning something you cannot reduce that component. If kids don’t like it then it doesn’t work. It’s as simple as that I think.

gamesandlearning.org: How would you have to change if you were really going to embrace the formal school market?

Björn Jeffrey: I don’t see us as an educational company. I see us as a company that makes apps for children or digital toys for children or more simply products for children, but it is about the children first. If they can be used in an educational context great, but that’s not the intent…

If we were to take on education and do it that way, partly we would lose all our international business. That’s number one. We sell in 160 countries and I am quarter Norwegian, a quarter Swedish and half English living in America. Trying to figure out the American educational system and realizing that even from state to state there are differences. It’s very complex. If I were to try and do it by the book at a state level, it would require four or five or six times as much work and I would be cutting off 50 percent of my total market. I would be losing all the other countries because Saudi Arabia doesn’t teach the same way as Nevada does…

We made some very intentional design decisions from the beginning in order to be an international company, for example reducing all language and all text so it’s all based on gestures, symbols, animations to lead children from one place to another. That was also so we did not have to have a lot of extra localization…

As soon as you go into learning state capitals or learning algebra or things like that actually varies quite a lot about how you do it and also when you do it – when is it appropriate for kids of different ages? If we were to go down that road I would basically have to completely start from scratch.

We’re thrilled to be working with our good friends at Games for Change this year as a content partner for the 11th annual Games for Change Festival. We’re particularly proud of the two panels that we’ve curated for Thursday, April 24, featuring some incredible speakers highlighting the innovative work that they are producing.

In our first panel, Remaking Learning: Live from Pittsburgh, we’ll discuss some of the exciting activities that are taking place among the gamers, technologists, artists, teachers, and others who are working across boundaries to create remarkable learning experiences for children and youth both in and out of school. Pittsburgh’s learning innovators, collectively known as the Kids+Creativity Network, have developed a 21st century model to support creative, collaborative, and connected learning opportunities. This talk-show style panel will discuss some of the many ways that Pittsburgh’s interconnectedness is helping to remake learning for our times.  Featuring Dr. Michael Levine, Drew Davidson, Gregg Behr, Cathy Lewis Long, and Michelle King.

Our second panel, Turning Fantasy into Reality: Building Games That Schools Need, will encourage developers hoping to break into the k-12 market to take a close look at the quirks and complexities of how schools operate, as well as what it takes to convince educators that a well-designed learning game is not just a nice add-on to the curriculum, but rather a powerful tool to assess students, personalize learning, and raise academic achievement. This panel will examine just what it takes to turn the fantasy of a game into a successful learning and assessment tool, the most common mistakes developers make, and what opportunities are mostly likely to open up for game developers trying to crack the code of the K-12 marketplace. Featuring Kevin C. Bushweller, Robert Torres, Constance Steinkuehler, and Alan Gershenfeld.

Additionally, on Wednesday evening (4/23), E-Line Media and the Cooney Center are proud to honor the winners of the 2013 National STEM Video Game Challenge at a special award ceremony hosted by Jesse Schell. We’re delighted that many of our winners will be able to join us in New York for the event, and are looking forward to celebrating their achievements!

Buy your tickets now to take advantage of an early bird deal: friends of the Cooney Center can save 20% off General Admission and Nonprofit/Government tickets with the code cooney_g4c14 before April 13.

We’ll see you there!

Last week Cooney Center Executive Director Michael Levine spoke at “Advancing Learning in the Digital Age,” a forum hosted by the Hourglass Foundation in Lancaster, PA. He spoke about the increasingly prominent role of digital technology in the lives and education of young children before an audience of more than 200 people.

Watch the video of his talk below:

Read more about the event on lancasteronline.org and see more videos on WITF.org.

Editor’s Note: Want to join the Joan Ganz Cooney Center team? Apply to be the 2016-2017 Cooney Center Fellow! We are accepting fellowship applications now through April 4, 2016.

Former Cooney Center Research Fellow Jason Yip opens up and shares his experiences and offers advice for those who are interested in applying. Here are just a few of the reasons why you should think about applying to one of the premiere fellowships in children and digital media.

The mission of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is to help answer the question, “How can digital media help children learn?” This is a pressing question for our time, not just for researchers, but for parents, teachers, pediatricians, policy makers, media and technology designers, and many others. As a Cooney Center fellow, you will be on the forefront of knowledge and research in attempting to pursue the answer to this complex and intricate question.

But isn’t the Cooney Center just about Sesame Workshop and Elmo?

We love Elmo! But really, we’re about so much more.

The Cooney Center is an independent research and innovation lab that focuses on how children learn and how to best educate them as technology and media rapidly evolves. We are housed within Sesame Workshop, but we conduct innovative and original research on emerging educational technologies and the interactive social landscape. The Cooney Center aims to promote conversation and dialogue between academic researchers, non-profits, and industry partners. So yes, while our research does inform the work of Sesame Workshop and other producers, we are also able to impact the work of policy makers, designers, and educators. It’s also pretty great to see Elmo and the Sesame Street cast in our offices too, but more about that later.

So what is the Cooney Center looking for in a research fellow?

The application process is not as shrouded in mystery as you might think.

We are looking for all kinds of applicants from education, psychology, human-computer interaction (child-computer interaction), learning sciences, instructional designers, media and communications, and any other research field in which children and digital media are forefront. If you have graduated from a masters or doctoral program, this is the right place to apply.

The Cooney Center Research Fellowship will provide you amazing research opportunities you will find nowhere else.

The research team’s meetings are worth recording.

I chose the Cooney Center for my postdoctoral research fellowship for several reasons. Having a research fellowship in the heart of New York City and Sesame Workshop provided me with a chance to work with partners I could never have imagined. For example, in my research work with the Families and Media Project, I am exploring mobility interaction patterns in Hispanic-Latino heritage families. I’ve had the chance to network with researchers from Stanford University, Northwestern University, Arizona State University, and Rutgers University to find out how important it is to understand family interactions around new digital media and the importance this has for learning. These networking opportunities with scholars across the country have opened up my perspective on digital media and learning that will impact my research for years to come.

You will attend meetings and conversations with scholars, policy makers, non-profit organizations, and industry partners.

See more photos from the Learning at Home event that took place in January 2014.

If you want to answer the question on the impact on learning of digital media with children, you can’t just stay within a single academic silo. At the Cooney Center, you will find a myriad of stakeholders who are just as passionate in trying to understand learning and digital media as any academic scholar. It is clear to me that one of the most attractive qualities about the Cooney Center is the way we serve as a central hub where people who care about this question of digital media and children come and work together. For example, at the Cooney Center’s Learning at Home report release event, we had over 150 academic scholars, non-profit directors, media producers, policy makers, and industry partners come together to have a dialogue about the current state of digital media and learning for children.

You will think very long and hard about questions on children’s media and learning you’ve never thought about before.

Being here at the Cooney Center, you are immersed with people asking really important questions and trying to understand how these issues impact design, implementation, and influence. For instance, one major question I am still grappling with in my own research is what do we mean when we say “educational media”? Who defines educational media? If a child learns about pro-social relationships from Spongebob Squarepants, is Spongebob considered to be educational? Questions like these are thoughtfully raised at the Cooney Center and have further challenged me to think about the current state of digital media and learning for children.

The most amazing, hardworking, and productive people work here at the Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop.

Who could ask for better colleagues? From left to right: Briana Pressey, Sadaf Sajwani, Anna Ly, and Lili Toutounas

At the Cooney Center, we have often been told that for such a small group of people (11 of us), we make a huge impact onto industry, research, and non-profits. This is absolutely true. Working together with Drs. Michael Levine and Lori Takeuchi, you will learn everything from new research methodologies to the latest in children’s policies and digital technologies. They are both a delight to work with and I am proud to call them and everyone at the Cooney Center my friends and supporters. I also met Fawn Qiu, creator of the now famous Flappy Box. The talent and dedication of the people at the Cooney Center and Sesame Workshop is infectious!

You will travel.

In the five months that I’ve been here, I have gone to meetings in Washington, DC at the New America Foundation and the University of Toronto in Canada. As a Cooney Center fellow, you will represent the center in many important meetings and meet many people to network.

You will be surrounded by your favorite Sesame Street characters.

A previous fellow once confessed, “I came for the Muppets.” Yes, I will absolutely admit the same thing. Coming from the University of Maryland – College Park, Jim Henson’s legacy exists as a great reminder of the importance of imagination, creativity, play, and fun in learning. Once I learned that I had gotten the research fellowship here, I took as many photos as possible. When you arrive at Sesame Workshop, you are immediately greeted by a giant video wall of the characters. And walking around the offices, you just can’t help but smile when you pass by the beautiful chalk art adorning the walls and seeing Elmo, Grover, and Cookie Monster (my personal favorite). There’s no denying this is one of the greatest reasons why the Cooney Center fellowship is the best experience you can get.

These reasons are fantastic for applying to the Cooney Center, but where’s the online quiz on the kind of Cooney Center Research Fellowship applicant I am?

There are only two kinds of Cooney Center applicants; the ones who apply and the ones who do not. You don’t need an online quiz to figure out which one you are.

Apply now.

Photo by Liu Di

Last month, here at TribePlay, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of Dr. Panda games. Since its initial release, the Dr. Panda series has expanded to over 14 educational games for kids. Dr. Panda games are uncommon in the sense that they do not focus on math and languages, but on life skills: skills that help kids recognize and deal with situations in everyday life.

In the two years we’ve been making kids’ apps, we have become strong believers in the importance of teaching life skills. However, it was actually a bit of serendipity that planted the idea of these educational games in our heads.

Before we started working on Dr. Panda in 2011, we were working as a game outsourcing company. One of our projects was to build a virtual world for children aged 6-12. It became a huge success in my home country of the Netherlands. When I observed children playing in our virtual world, it struck me how much they enjoyed role playing. They would customize their own room as a restaurant and ask their virtual friends to sit on chairs while they pretended to cook and serve imaginary food to them. The guests would then pretend to eat with text bubbles saying “mmmm, that tasted nice.” They wouldn’t stop at the restaurant either: they would go on to simulate school life, going to a hospital, taking care of imaginary babies. These kids seemed to love to perform activities in the virtual world for which they were too small in real life. This virtual world made perfect sense to them.

That observation had a profound impact on us when we decided to develop our own mobile games. We wondered if we could somehow apply our experience from the virtual world to our new product, which would eventually become Dr. Panda. Could we use children’s love for role-playing for educational purposes, and if so: how?

We made two important decisions. First: if we want to teach life skills, then we must touch on subjects that kids would recognize in real life so that they can learn from it.  Second: if we want children to learn something, they should also enjoy it so that they will remember better. These two tenants became the basis of our design philosophy for Dr. Panda.

Dr. Panda’s Restaurant by TribePlay

So how does this work in practice? We make sure that every game concept is checked against our design philosophy. If it is approved, we then make a prototype version and test it with kids directly. These play tests not only provide us with the information necessary to improve the games, but sometimes they also show the immediate results of playing our games. For example, a principle that we follow in our games is to take something familiar, such as making soup. After playing Dr. Panda’s Restaurant, the kids we observed were able to explain how to make soup and which ingredients to use. We then provide them with some more detailed information, such as which ingredients or method of preparation to use. In this way, kids will have a better understanding of situations that they see in real life.

We often receive emails and user comments from parents sharing similar experiences with us: children feeling more confident about going to the doctor after playing Dr. Panda’s Hospital, helping in the kitchen after playing Dr. Panda’s Restaurant, and becoming more familiar with grocery shopping and money while playing Dr. Panda’s Supermarket.

Our user feedback confirms that using games to teach kids life skills is a successful venture. However, we have no formal research results yet that support this, as there appears to be little or no research on our type of games. We feel not only that more research on the benefits of educational games should be done, but also that research into “educational” games should not be limited to reading and math apps. That is why we are now exploring with partners to help us study the effects of games like ours. We would be interested in seeing the results!

Thijs Bosma is the CEO and founder of TribePlay, the studio behind the Dr. Panda series of mobile games for kids. TribePlay launched its first Dr. Panda game in 2012. Since then, 13 more Dr. Panda games have been released which have been downloaded more than 15,000,000 times. They have won numerous awards and accolades, from the Children’s Technology Review’s Editor’s Choice Award to being featured in publications like USA Today and Wired. Dr. Panda’s international appeal has been shown by topping the charts in several categories in countries like the US, Holland, Germany, France, Mexico and Russia.

Prior to founding TribePlay Thijs worked at Spil Games in Shanghai, China. Thijs is originally from Amsterdam, The Netherlands and currently lives in Chengdu, China.

Photo by Jessica Millstone

This year the Cooney Center attended SXSWedu in full force, with three separate opportunities to share our work on how teachers, researchers, game developers, and investors are bringing true games-based learning to K-12 classrooms.  After presenting with Allisyn Levy of BrainPOP and Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow on Monday, I was able to relax and enjoy the rest of conference, including Michael Levine’s Digital Playground talk on Tuesday and the Games & Learning Publishing Council session later that afternoon. Here are some of the things we saw at SXSWedu 2014:

1)  It was NOT all about data, data, data this year!   At last year’s SXSWedu conference, there was a clear emphasis on the accumulation and mining of student data, often with the goal of making or saving money for start-up companies or large school districts.  However, the programming and participants at this year’s conference had more nuanced attitude about data, focusing on using it as information to make changes in the classroom itself.  It was a welcome change of perspective on the topic, and hopefully a trend moving forward in ed-tech development.

2)  It was also NOT all about the ed-tech entrepreneur!   Perhaps it was the intentionally educator-focused programming that this year’s conference organizers curated, or maybe there was more balanced recruitment from the non-profit and education community, but the overall attendance seemed to include far more educators than in 2013.  Some of those educators had feet in both worlds; two Austin-based teachers I met were there to learn more about the ed-tech community in Austin and beyond, as well as let people know about their start-up that provides innovative professional development for those working in special needs classrooms.  They gave a positive review of the conference — especially regarding the quality of workshops and panels designed for special educators, and the opportunities those sessions gave them to meet others working in that space.

3) The Digital Playground/MakerSpace.  With BrainPOP in charge of curation, last year’s small, dark room with a few Legos scattered around morphed into a true maker/playspace to explore educational games and fun hands-on activities.  Michael Levine gave a short talk on research the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is conducting on the games-based learning space, and lots of teachers stopped by throughout the week to try out new games and get advice from each other on how to integrate these technologies into the classroom.  The presence of the Playful Learning, Institute of Play, and MinecraftEDU professional development teams at SXSWedu this year also helped to draw in and support teachers as they experimented with these new learning tools.

4) Plenty of new ideas about teaching & learning at the formal sessions.  My experience of most of this year’s sessions was that panelists took care to make their topics come alive and involve the audience in a conversation or debate about how to really evolve teaching and learning as much as possible.  Of special note, this year’s LAUNCHedu competition brought in educators to review each company’s product. Ironically, the middle school teacher on the panel found most of the new products TOO staid — they might make use of an innovative or disruptive technology, but encourage the same old pedagogies teachers too often fall back on.

5) Genuinely open and friendly networking opportunities. SXSWedu is known to be a fun education conference with lots of parties and chances to partake of Austin nightlife, but this year the daytime networking was also rewarding. People took time to really connect and share ideas with each other after each session. Some attendees told me that they wished there were even more chances to do that, perhaps as part of an “unconference” or EdCamp portion of the conference next year.

Not everything was perfect of course — Austin was hit by the notorious “polar vortex” of freezing cold weather right as we arrived (they were even predicting snow!) and the over-packed programming schedule spread across two venues made it challenging to pull together a cohesive learning track. There also weren’t as many sessions on games-based learning as at other education conferences I’ve attended over the last 12 months, which came as a surprise. However, overall this conference was an amazing professional learning opportunity and I hope to be able to participate again in 2015!  

The poets of the early eighteenth century saw it as clearly as we do: “slugs, snails and puppy dog tails” delight all kids equally. But on International Womens’ Day 300 years later, despite all our advancements, “sugar and spice and everything nice” persists as our overwhelming message to girls—and the cumulative effect is anything but advanced.

From toddlerhood, girls are inundated by messages that “princesses” are either not cut out for math and science or not welcome in it. A report by the U.S. Department of Education pinpoints eighth grade as the critical point of divergence, when girls veer away from subjects that would propel them into everything from astronomy to architecture. Apparel retailer The Children’s Place produced girls’ t-shirts emblazoned with My Best Subjects, with a list that featured checkmarks for shopping, music and dancing. Math was listed, but not checked. The punchline? “Nobody’s Perfect.”

ⓒJeongMee Yoon: The Blue Project, Kihun and His Blue Things (2007) & The Pink Project, Seowoo and Her Pink Things (2005)

After much ado online, The Children’s Place eventually pulled the shirts and apologized, as did JC Penny after the outcry over its sweatshirt that read I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me. “The fact that these shirts even made it past the concept stage speaks volumes about the gross disparity that still exists between how we speak with boys and girls about their abilities and career opportunities in the STEM disciplines,” says Cheryl Schrader, Chancellor of the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

The good news is that the imbalances and negative messages that add up to girls abandoning STEM are low-hanging fruit. Jane Huston speaks to gender equality in STEM fields in a recent Disease Daily piece: “There are a lot of people thinking, writing and working to mitigate the problem. I don’t know how we correct these biases, but raising awareness of the problem, especially on this 102nd International Women’s Day, feels like a good piece of the solution.”

Although the pervasiveness of negative bias makes it seem like an overwhelming problem, our contribution as adults who work in media and entertainment is overwhelmingly simple. It’s easy to meet kids where they are—in the movies, TV shows, and digital games they already inhabit—and put alternatives to “sugar and spice” in their frame of view. It just requires a creative pause.

As game designers who create stories and immersive worlds for play, it is just as easy to move beyond tired tropes of damsels in distress and little soldiers as it is to perpetuate the status quo. We can offer the superheroism, exploration, critical thinking and self-sufficiency that makes all kids think, “Yeah! Cool. I can do that.”

In Wired Magazine, longtime gamer Laura Hudson speaks to the immersive power of videogames as a gateway to possibility: “…Cloaked in her genderless robotic exoskeleton, she could be defined by what she did, rather than what she looked like. Like Samus wearing the robot suit, I found that videogames allowed me to become a person who did things—but usually only if I was willing to shed my gender. It’s the price of admission, the coin you pay to cross the river.”

It’s not that video games, as one of the most popular entertainments of children today, should be genderless. Quite the opposite. 45% of the billions of people who play video games are female. By presenting female and male characters in equal proportions—endowed with equal strengths and equal challenges—games can engage 100% of players. A plethora of academic foundations and social movements echo this demand—parents want more than lip gloss and pink ruffles for their daughters, and more than one-dimensional, aggressive machismo for their sons. The rallying cry that’s an interesting parallel for both: If she can see it, she can be it. Why not model truly imaginative, inclusive, and wild adventure for all? The opportunity for gaming to respond is huge.

Photo by Lital Marom

Western governments link our advancement directly to the influx of new thinkers to science-based industries. The more we invent, the more we grow. STEM is a trending acronym for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and it’s trending because these are fields critical to the well-being of tomorrow.

Childhood is the natural breeding ground of fascination—naturally attuned to everything curious, kids are intuitive scientists who begin, perhaps, by alternately poking at and caring for slugs, snails, and puppy dogs. By presenting children with a full frame of possibility and potential at an early age, we cultivate an all-hands-on-deck world.

“It matters because there is no sector of our economy poised for more growth than the STEM fields,” says Schrader. “It matters because the more diverse our workforce of engineers, computer programmers, mathematicians and scientists, the more likely we are to find solutions that further our society and grow the economy. It matters because it’s just not right to leave half of the population out of the equation.”

Lital Marom is CEO of Beyond, a gaming label that takes an inclusive, progressive approach to immersive play—with fun characters and narratives that free children from tired, gender-based stereotypes and engage both girls and boys to their full potential. Beyond builds games that appeal to children and parents equally for a more balanced industry and world. Follow along by subscribing to Beyond’s Facebook page. Beyond are actively looking for developer and research partners to create and collaborate—get in touch to start the conversation.

On Tuesday, March 4, Lee Banville moderated “Lost in Translation: Applying the Latest Research” at SXSWEdu with Bjorn Jeffery (Toca Boca), Chris Curran (Education Growth Partners), and Sujata Bhatt (The Incubator School). This post originally appeared in gamesandlearning.org.

Chris Curran to developers seeking funding: “Even if it is small-scale and anecdotal, you should have evidence of efficacy.”

There are research reports that highlight the efficacy of games as assessment tools, studies that show certain games can help students suffering from dyslexia and market analyses of the projected overseas learning games market. But how much of this research actually makes it into games you find in the App Store remains a mystery.

Representatives of three different sectors – game developers, investors and teachers – weighed in on the matter at a session Tuesday at SXSWedu and their answers raised as many questions as they likely answered.

The designer dilemma
Björn Jeffrey, the CEO of youth app powerhouse Toca Boca, stressed that one of the major problems is that “the bar is extremely low” to be considered an educational app in the App Store and so discerning between claims and actual educational value is impossible.

“There is no way to gauge if it is really educational,” he said, adding that many apps promote what he called “faux assessment.”

But the solution, Jeffrey said, is not as easy to identify.

He said he hoped a third party rating firm could offer parents, teachers and others a better sense to what products actually have some research and evidence behind them.

The danger, he said, is without more efforts to create a qualitative measure the battle for the trust of parents may be lost.

The investor’s questions
For those deciding whether to sink their money into a given educational technology, the question of research is often answered by the simple question: how much money is at risk?

Chris Curran, managing partner at Education Growth Advisors, stressed that private equity firms that are considering a major investment will scour thousands of pages of reports or conduct their own research, “to identify every possible risk or opportunity before they make the investment” of what could be tens of millions of dollars.

For Curran, the gaps in research exist more around the smaller-scale investments that are usually involved in learning games. He said that game developers who want to garner backing for startup projects should still come with some evidence.

“Even if it is small-scale and anecdotal, you should have evidence of efficacy,” Curran told the room of developers and researchers.

The teacher’s story
Developers and investors still need strong research to test concepts and prove efficacy, but for the teacher in the classroom the need lands closer to home, said Sujata Bhatt, creator of the Incubator School and a teacher.

“We need case studies of how using games really looks and really works that we can share with administrators,” she said.

She added that these case studies are critical because most change in larger school districts start from one teacher sharing what they are doing and what is working with another individual teacher. This one-to-one interaction is critical and thorough case studies of best practices strengthen those conversations.

In each case, the SXSWedu panel highlighted the need for research in different forms to continue to evolve game design, improve investment strategy and encourage innovation by teachers. Part of the challenge will continue to be finding what research is out there already and connecting those studies to the right audiences and then identifying gaps in the research and promoting more work in those areas.

New York Hall of Science. Photo by Jason Yip.

One of the great opportunities I’ve had here at the Cooney Center is being able to meet a diverse group of people from academia, industry, and non-profits that really cares about the question, “How can digital media help children learn?”  I’ve recently had the privilege of sharing my work and research at The New York Hall of Science in Queens, NY (NYSCI). I was invited by my good friend, Matty Lau, Director of Pre-Service Science Teacher Education Program, to give a lunch time talk on my research. Briefly, much of my research examines how we can promote youth to become more engaged and increase participation through the design of new technologies and learning environments. Specifically, I examine how digital technologies can connect homes, schools, after-schools, libraries, and other domains to support how children can see themselves in science. I also research how children can take a more active role and work together with adults to create and co-design future technologies for other children. So I came in already really excited to see what kinds of intersections NYSCI had with my own research on children and digital media.

During my talk, we discussed and debated many topics, such as, what is the connection between participation in science and learning and how can communities come together to support co-designing new technologies with children? It was clear to me that NYSCI is a community that really cares about serving the community through engagement in science. All this stimulating conversation took place over some great pizza, too.

After my talk, I was able to meet many members of the NYSCI community who were just as excited about the role of digital media and technology in learning. I was able to interact with researchers and stakeholders who really take seriously this notion of how digital technologies can promote and support learning in children and families. Coming into NYSCI, you immediately get a sense of wonder and amazement at the possibilities for increasing participation in science. Here, science isn’t just a series of facts and abstract knowledge. Instead, children can physically explore the exhibits and participate in new conversations about science. What people might not realize about NYSCI is that it is also a hub for research and development into the innovative technologies for science engagement and learning.

For example, I spent time learning about a future exhibit opening next year called Connected Worlds, an immersive experience focused on the water cycle. This is not your old-fashioned textbook view of the water cycle. In Connected Worlds, participants and visitors enter the Great Hall, where they can see an entire ecosystem and the water cycle. Instead of just a video on a single wall, Connected Worlds uses multiple projectors onto different walls to display forests, animals, rivers, plants, and other parts of a complex ecosystem. Using Kinect-based technologies, NYSCI participants can interact with the room through gestures, touch, and even tangible control. Instead of a static video, the entire room response to changes in the water system. Animals can come and go to water sources for drinking. Transpiration can been seen in the plants. Water can evaporate from the sources into the clouds. Rain comes when the clouds are saturated. All of these pieces come together as a large simulation of a complex system. Researchers at NYSCI are interested in how to promote systems thinking and show how connections in the ecosystem and environmental stress can impact the amount of water available in the simulation. I will have the great privilege of seeing Connected Worlds as a test demonstration very soon at NYSCI and hope to write more about this experience.

NYSCI researchers and members are also greatly interested in professional development with science teachers. Specifically, NYSCI is looking to address how a science and technology center, with many resources, can make a deep impact into educating and working with teacher practitioners to promote science engagement. This means going beyond the walls of just traditional professional development. NYSCI community members are actively using online communities and platforms, as well as working with partner organizations such as the City University of New Y ork and the New York Department of Education to work with teachers and teaching candidates to deepen the teachers’ pedagogical, disciplinary, and pedagogical content knowledge. In the future, NYSCI wants to develop new ways in which teachers all over the country can work with the science and technology center to sharpen their skills in the classroom.

Finally, the work of NYSCI looks into makerspaces and increasing participation through creativity, design, and sharing. One initiative on the forefront of NYSCI is “Little Makers”, that is, how can we promote creation and building in children 18-months and up. Here, researchers are looking for way to understand how learning happens when children are given the chance to build and create. Researchers at NYSCI are asking the question of what the principles of engagement that we can observe in making and what kinds of quality making experiences can be supported between young children and families.

Overall, my visit to NYSCI was extremely productive. Looking into the future of my own research, I really see science and technology centers as central hubs and partners to promote science learning beyond just the local visitors. NYSCI’s approach and commitment towards state-of-the-art technologies, teacher professional development, and early childhood learning demonstrates that science centers are not just tourist attractions, but places where deeper thinking into STEM learning can take place.