Attending SXSW Interactive is a little like being on safari.

The day begins with anticipation, involves endless strategizing around where to be and what ballrooms offer the maximum return, and ends with a re-cap of which “big game” was spotted, what life-changing experiences were narrowly missed and what was photo (or Tweet, or Instagram, or Meerkat) worthy.

The highs and lows are all there—some great speakers sharing the new and unexpected, some sessions so popular they require sacrificing your morning to stand in line and a few panels falling so short that they inspire rage over the Panel Picking process. Throw in Grumpy cat, book-reading squirrels, Mophie dogs and a robot petting zoo and you’re better off preparing for a safari than for an ordinary conference.

This year’s SXSW Interactive spanned over 100 themes from Fashion to Food to Gaming and Health, taking place over several miles of venues in Austin, TX. The Cooney Center hosted a panel, Playing to Learn: Lessons from Game Design Gurus, and tracked these five trends across our five days at the festival:

Diversity as marketing buzzword

Facebook and Ipsos MediaCT shared findings from their latest survey on the connection between culture and social.  The packed room let out an audible sigh when presenters shifted from survey data (i.e., 48 percent of U.S. Hispanics’ Facebook friends are family members, compared with 36 percent for the overall population) to show video “case studies” pitching more advertisers to flock to Facebook.

More substantive panels related to issues of cultural diversity were common at SXSW, but many reflected the interest of marketers to reach an increasingly diverse digital audience.

Storytelling through data

At the intersection of “big data” and a growing news presence, dozens of SXSW sessions focused on using data to tell compelling stories.  Steve Duenes, the Associate Editor responsible for interactive storytelling at the New York Times, compared traditional bar charts to parking garages (all function with no elegance) and emphasized the “craftsmanship” involved in turning a great idea into a memorable story.

He also described the huge cultural change required to support a multidisciplinary approach for the type of reporting found in The Upshot and many in the audience asked him what types of digital pros they could hire to achieve similar results.

New platforms, new business models

Whether panelists were talking about well-known but evolving platforms like games for kids, or unchartered territory like virtual reality, the struggle for funding is universal.

Game design veteran and Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning offered a master class in designing new IP for new technologies, emphasizing the need to “fail faster, sooner, and cheaper,” and warning that if you “cook it too long, audience tastes will change.”

Filament’s Lee Wilson, Whyville’s James Bower and their fellow panelists debated the limits that should be applied to monetizing kids’ games and discussed the effects of “polluting the market” with games that are designed solely for advertising revenue.

Bright future for health, cars and space travel

For years, SXSW has been known as the platform for new budding companies to launch products from check-in applications to cat meme generators. It’s also been the venue where speakers like Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at Google[x] talk about the future, encouraging audience members to think ahead and think big.

This year, health and science were fairly big themes with Paola Antonelli spending most of her talk “Curious Bridges: How Designers Grow the Future” pointing out various pieces of work with strong ties to the space, while Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Gurley discussed the near future of autonomous cars. NASA had a strong presence with a number of sessions featuring astronauts, researchers, and scientists all discussing the future and current state of space exploration.

Neuroscience researchers Daphne Bavelier and Adam Gazzaley shared provocative data about how games are disrupting health and education, by speeding up the pace of learning and slowing down  age-related deficits. According to SXSW, the future is fairly bright. Who actually takes advantage of it and makes the next big splash is up to us.

Research critical to user-centered design

Design has always been a consistent and strong part of SXSW — it comes up in a variety ways including how to best design the user experience, using big data for design, designing for a certain population (usually for the most recent generation) and design thinking.

One common theme for this year was how to use observation and research methods to ground and inform design.

Genevieve Bell, Intel’s Corporate Sensing & Insights lead, along with Mimi Ito, Professor at the Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine, described their own experiences with using research and how to convince others around them of its importance. Given both have an anthropology background, it wasn’t a surprise that Bell and Ito emphasized that to best design for users, look at behaviors in context.

Essentially, we need to spend time with users while they live their lives and ground ourselves in everyday experience since what users do is very different from what they say they do. Ito pointed out that if you study kids (or other users) for a while, the stuff they use may change but the behaviors are consistent so designers should keep track of those consistent behavior markers.

And our Cooney Center session, Playing to Learn: Lessons from Game Design Gurus, featured an all-star panel sharing lessons learned from using research to inform playful learning experiences.  Cecilia Weckstrom, senior director of LEGO.com summed up a sentiment shared at much of SXSW:  “Just at the time you think you have it just right, that’s the time to start questioning it all over again.” Until the next Austin safari, many SXSW participants will be looking for the answers.

On March 23, Michael Levine presented “Teaching with Digital Games,” a webinar for the Share My Lesson Virtual Conference with Rebecca Rufo-Tepper from the Institute of Play. The session was attended live by nearly 500 participants, and is now available for view on demand on the Share My Lesson website until March 22, 2016. Participants who take the webinar are eligible to receive one hour of professional development credit.

Register online to view the session.

This post was originally published on gamesandlearning.org.

LEGO deploys research to answer many of its most critical questions.

Whether developing formal learning games aimed for the classroom or apps you want parents to purchase for their kids, the role of research in game development and assessment of learning is one of the most critical decisions developers must make.

A discussion at this week’s SXSW Interactive encouraged developers to consider the way they use product research and how best to guard against the pitfalls of group-think.

For game giant LEGO research counters two major challenges, said Cecilia Weckström, senior director of LEGO.com – battling over-confidence and keeping in mind their audience.

“It takes a lot of effort to step out of where we are now and remember what it was like when I was five. So being aware of that and trying to set your work up in such a way to try and see the world through the eyes of a child is critical,” she told the audience, adding that if you don’t change your perspective, you run the risk of simply saying “this would be fun. I’d like to do it.”

She pointed to the experience of her own company, where she said two decades of strong sales had created a problem, leading “to a culture where we all thought we knew what it took to make great products.”

The company went through a period where sales grew stagnant and LEGO had to reinvent itself and launch new products. Weckström said the time had been a challenge, but also taught her that:

Just at the time you think you have it just right, that’s the time to start questioning it all over again because success is the biggest thing that can get in your way and will keep you from seeing the other gorilla in the room until it is too late.

–Cecilia Weckström, senior director of LEGO.com

But oftentimes the role of research is more clear-cut, said Tinsley Galyean, whose Global Literacy Project has been putting apps and tablets in some of the most remote locations on the globe to see how these tools could improve reading.

Galyean said good research plans aim to answer critical questions like, “Is it usable? Is it engaging? And, third, does learning actually happen when kids engage it?”

But that is not to say that the researcher’s work always resonates with creative team.

Elliot Hedman, whose research into human behavior and emotions has broken new ground, recalled how at one point he had been working with kids to understand why they didn’t want to play board games. He said his research found it had a lot to do with reading the directions. Hedman said he remembered, “one kid told me, ‘It’s like going to school.’”

He took the research back to the team and they responded by saying there wasn’t enough time to fix it. It left him realizing that, “As a researcher 10 percent of your work is identifying the problem and at least 50 percent of your work is helping others understand the problem and creating a joint solution to address the problem.”

Structuring Effective Research

Still the panel stressed much of the challenge of getting the most out of research has to do with communications and clarity.

Weckström said much of this has to do with encouraging both an “open road” approach to designing where everything is on the table and creativity flows and a more “closed” process where the best solution is tested and accepted.

She said at LEGO the design process starts with more of the open road where many ideas and solutions are proposed and toyed with, but then, she added, “you start to want to evaluate and determine what is the best solution and so you move into a closed environment,” which is much more organized and rational. She stressed that developers should ensure that the entire team is in sync when doing both forms of research to ensure a clear process.

Galyean compared the LEGO process to the Global Literacy Project’s effort by saying in his shop they have different skillsets in the design effort, including designers, coders and researchers and each creates a constraint on the free flow of ideas.

But that’s a good thing, he added.

“You learn quickly it sucks not having constraints,” he said, adding the constraints “create the puzzle or problem you are trying to resolve.”

But well constructed research can work with those restraints and deal with other challenges if they are factored into the design and research process, the panel said.

The key, Hedman said, is to realize the limitations and incorporate them.

He said that research involving kids will always be a challenge and told the story of some of his research he had done for Weckström’s LEGO. A young boy had become frustrated trying to play with the LEGOs and went to his mother and begged to play with something else. When Hedman asked what the boy enjoyed most, he thought for a moment and said, “I really loved the LEGOs.”

The moment made Hedman realize, “When you interview kids they often don’t want to tell you how they are feeling want to tell you how they think.”

The panel was moderated by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Michelle Miller. The Center is also responsible for gamesandlearning.org.

This post originally appeared on gamesandlearning.org

Session set to explore the challenges of innovating and the role of research in the design process.

A session at SXSW Interactive on Monday, March 16 will offer some real insights into how various companies think about design and use research in their product development.

The session will feature Cecilia Weckström, senior director of LEGO.com; Tinsley Galyean, founder and CTO of the Global Literacy Project, a collaboration between MIT, Tufts, & GSU; and Elliott Hedman, whom Wired labeled as a pioneer of new design research.

Ahead of the conversation, we asked some of those participating to offer some insights into how they continue to evolve design and research strategies.

For Cecilia Weckström, she said her challenge is to remain “open to what is.”

“As human beings we have a tendency to follow things (people and companies) that confirm our point of view, validate our perspective and in that way, invisibly make us become more entrenched in a view we already have,” she said this week.

Weckström added that the growth of customized and personalized digital media and search tools have made it harder to fight this threat to creativity. “For this reason I try to experiment a lot – I use apps like Zite and others to test what different algorithms recommend me, and I deliberately try to break my own patterns. The greatest threat to any research is confirmation bias, hence working against it takes an active effort,” she said.

For Hedman, whose work focuses a lot on testing stresses on players and users of products, he finds himself turning to core pieces of literature in the research field to fuel his strategies.

When asked what people should be reading to understand design and research he pointed to Research Methods for Social Work by Allen Rubin and Earl Babbie, saying, “The authors spend a considerable amount of time talking about ‘How do we know we know?,’ which I believe is the essential question for why traditional design research often comes up short with easily influenced children.”

But for Hedman it is also about still finding inspiration in the games and forms of games that may seem dated. Or, he is just nuts about board games.

“My not-so-secret passion is how to teach people how to play board games. Fantasy Flight released a spectacular board game, XCOM, that seamlessly combines with an app. XCOM is complicated, think Monopoly or Settlers of Catan on steroids, but rather than having the painful experience of reading directions for an hour, the game taught us as we played,” he said ahead of Monday’s session. “We first learned to put UFOs on the board, then we learned to place interceptors, and later on we learned how to buy back our interceptors when the UFOs inevitably shot them down. The experience was so well thought out, it was as if there were no directions at all: we learned while in a state of play.”

All three panelists will be discussing the big picture of design and the role of research in that picture Monday at 3:30 at the Hyatt Regency Zilker Ballroom 4. The session is open to all who are registered for SXSW Interactive and is moderated by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center Managing Director Michelle Miller.

We recently released Family Time with Apps: A Guide to Using Apps with Your Kids, a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers. The book features comic strips that parents and children can enjoy together, as well as tips on selecting apps that can help turn screen time into family time. Whether the challenge is preparing for a new experience like starting school, spending more time outside, connecting to distant loved ones, or reading together every day, the guide provides tips on how using apps together can support a child’s learning and development. It is available from the iBook Store.

We’ve invited some experts to share their own perspectives on the scenarios that we explore in Family Time with Apps. Teri Rousseau, Reading Rainbow’s president of education, shares some tips on fostering a lifelong love of reading.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had a mother who read to me. I can’t remember how young I was when it started, but I can recall sitting by her as she read my favorite stories like Ferdinand the Bull, The Little Engine that Could and Where is My Mother, among others.

Our nightly adventures didn’t stop when I learned to read. She continued reading bedtime stories to me up through grade school with chapter books. This nightly reading was a wonderful ritual, and I have vivid memories of my older brothers, too cool to join us, hiding behind my bedroom door, listening in from the hallway.

These moments left a lasting impression on me, which I have tried to carry on to my own children who—to no one’s surprise—are passionate readers.

Research shows that becoming a reader starts long before children even enter school. In fact, the younger and more frequently a child is exposed to books the better. Reading aloud to your child is an important part of their development. It builds literacy and language skills by exposing them to vocabulary they may not hear in everyday conversation. It also helps a child develop comprehension and critical thinking skills by introducing them to new concepts and broadening their view of the world. This is why initiatives like Too Small to Fail (a joint partnership between Bill and Hilary Clinton) and Next Generation are focusing on helping parents and caregivers understand the importance of reading to children as young as toddlers, and providing tools to help them do so.

Photo courtesy of Reading Rainbow

Last year my teenage daughter Jessica started a mentoring program she calls the Reading Rainbow Teen Story Time. Working with a local Title One elementary school, Jessica and a group of teens meet each week to read aloud to first graders. Learning to read for many of these young children has been difficult for a variety of reasons. Some have rarely been read to one-on-one and this is a relatively new experience for them. Others have a language barrier, as English is commonly a second language in this particular school. The teens understood that these students were not particularly excited about reading time, so they decided to approach it from a new and exciting angle by using their digital devices and the Reading Rainbow app. Each week the teens bring a tablet device, loaded with the Reading Rainbow app, a collection of fiction and non-fiction books for early elementary school children. The weekly sessions are structured around exploring a theme or genre such as animals, poetry, or fables. This ties the reading time into the broader curriculum. The first grader can browse the digital library and together they choose books within the theme that interest the child. The teen mentor then reads aloud a few stories and before each page is turned the first grader taps the interactive illustrations on the page making the story come alive. At the end of each story time, the teen talks to the first grader about the themes and topics they’ve read about, and share a bit more about themselves. As a result, the young students who have participated all now say they find “reading fun” and “like reading”.

The success of this teen volunteer reading program is likely due to a number of elements. A young adult paired with a first grade child provides a role model for reading that is needed but not often seen by these students. But perhaps what most sets this program apart is the fact that it integrates technology as a means to get children excited about literature.

For those parents who do not always have time to take their children to the library to select books or read to their child every day, digital solutions can be another way to help fill the gap and develop the early-literacy skills a child will need when learning to read.

5 Tips for Raising a Reader:

1. Surround your child with books from the very beginning. A child raised in a French-speaking household grows up to speak French. A child raised on a farm grows up knowing about planting and harvesting. Just so, a child raised around books will grow up feeling comfortable with books.
2. Read aloud to your child every day—even when it seems like they aren’t listening. If your child seems disinterested in the book you’re reading don’t give up! It may be you just haven’t found the right story yet. You can choose a different book, let your child choose a new book, or even experiment with using different voices.
3. When your child gets old enough, let her read to you every once in a while. Kids love to show off for their parents, so when your child gets old enough, take a break from your nightly read-aloud and ask her to read aloud to you every once in a while. Be sure to be an active and excited listener, making all the appropriate “ooh”s and “aah”s!
4. Talk about books. Dinner is a perfect time to ask questions about what your child is reading, or even to tell them about what you’re reading. Show your kids that books don’t have to be a solitary activity.
5. Make time to read for yourself. It’s surprising how often we try and try to get our kids to read, and yet we never think to pick up a book for ourselves. Children watch what their parents do, and they learn from what they see. If they never see their parents reading kids will learn that reading is not a valuable or important activity.

What are some of your favorite tips or apps for family time? Share them in the comments below or via Facebook or Twitter with the hashtag #familytimewithapps, and we’ll publish highlights on the blog!

Teri Rousseau joined Reading Rainbow in 2012 to launch the new Reading Rainbow digital library. She is now President of Educational Services and focused on launching a Classroom Edition this fall for early elementary students and their educators. Throughout Teri’s career, she has produced over 100 interactive learning products on a variety of digital platforms. She is a frequent speaker and guest contributor on the power of digital media and learning. She is also the mother of two tech-savvy girls. To learn more about the upcoming Reading Rainbow library visit www.readingrainbow.com

In an education setting, video games are often dismissed as mindless entertainment. This was the opposite in the National STEM Video Game Challenge Workshop hosted at the Science Museum of Virginia (SMV), where Barrie Adleberg and I helped students to critically think about the mechanics of a video game and apply them to their own passions.

Students from all over Richmond filed into one of the Museum’s classrooms; they were clearly excited to find out what a video game design workshop was all about. As a mentor who works down in the SMV’s MiX Maker Lab, it always inspires me to see students come into these workshops in order to apply the knowledge they learned in school to something much more interactive like a video game. The workshop itself ran each of the kids through the very basics of video game design itself. Starting from the foundations of Rock Paper Scissors all the way to making their own computer game on Gamestar Mechanic, students brainstormed their way from paper to programming.

At first, each student appeared skeptical when they heard that video games like Assassin’s Creed or Minecraft have the same elements of a game like Rock Paper Scissors. It all seemed way too simple. However, after breaking it down and identifying the five basic game elements of space, rules, components, mechanics, and goals, students began to see how games that are even as complicated-looking as the Legend of Zelda all centered around one simple idea. Their faces gleamed and ideas were shouted around the room about modifying simple games, and the creativity ran wild in their own modifications to the Rock Paper Scissors game.

After the first activity, I led students down to the Science Museums official Maker Lab, the MiX, to show just how many resources they had access to in order to make their games. Students looked around in amazement and disbelief at all of the technology laid out. Audio recording equipment, 3D Printing, the Adobe Creative Suite, Makey Makey’s, and DSLR cameras were all available to use at their disposal. At the Mix, local students from the workshop have the possibility to make any game they want, using Flash to animate cutscenes or program a plat former, 3D printing figurines for a tabletop game, or even building their own custom game controller with an Arduino board.

I saw that the students were surprising themselves with the ideas they were able to come up with in a team, and they were thrilled to make something that was playable on the same level as their favorite video games. The point where students made their own game on paper with whatever supplies they were given was a major highlight. One group in particular fiddled with rubber bands and paperclips to create a slingshot to launch multicolored starbursts into a cup. A girl from the group walked up to me and demonstrated how the game worked.

“YOU ARE CAPTAIN STARBURST ABOUT TO TAKE OVER THE ENEMY CASTLE!” she said as dramatically as possible.

“The only way to make it to the fortress is to catapult yourself over the wall! The shot that makes it inside the wall wins the game,” she said with a smile.

Her excitement and pride at showing off her game was infectious. I got excited about her game just listening to her acting out the different mechanics and seeing all of her colorful game pieces. She loved showing off what she made, and it was encouraging to see such enthusiasm and thought put into constructing a game. I took a good look at her cone-shaped fortress, carefully constructed out of yellow construction paper, generous amounts of rubber bands, and an eraser topper crowning the top.

Right at the very end, students were provided with a final resource and challenge. The last resource was access to Gamestar Mechanic, a site that makes it easy  to create a video game through tinkering and experimentation. The students were then encouraged to enter the National STEM Video Game Challenge with the game they created with Gamestar Mechanic for a chance to have big name studio representatives, like the makers of Assassin’s Creed playtest their games. At the mention of a professional playtest, one kid’s mouth gaped open and he jumped out of his seat to register for the software. In my years mentoring at the lab I have never seen as much enthusiasm as I have with those students in the workshop.

My experience in the public school system, as well as teaching the STEM Video Game workshop helped me realize something. Students don’t realize how much they are actually capable of making with all of the knowledge they’ve gained from school. Often times they don’t get a chance to critically apply their skills and overcome a lot of real life challenges seen in the professional world. In school, each subject is presented in isolation, like an individual ingredient, without any sort of guide on how to apply and combine any of them together. Without hands-on application, it becomes difficult to understand how something complicated like video games or other STEM fields connect back to trigonometry proofs. Video games, however, bridge that gap by presenting puzzling elements and hurdles in both gameplay and development that cause the player/ developer to think critically back to their own knowledge from school to figure out how to solve these problems. It’s a fun and engaging hands-on solution needed to boost critical thinking skills that are lacking in a lot of public school systems today. Like the building blocks used in Minecraft, students came out of this workshop with a roadmap ready to use their own blocks of knowledge and build something incredible for others to enjoy.

Emily Kundrot is a MiX Maker Lab Mentor and a Freelance Animator for the Science Museum of Virginia in Richmond, Virginia. Her work specializes in outreach education and working to inspire all through the art of moving image. When she is not constantly sketching new ideas on napkins, you can catch her writing synth loops on her pocket synth or playing her favorite game, Earthbound, on her old Super Nintendo. You can view her work at www.emakunart.com.