Update: The 4th National STEM Video Game Challenge
The entries are in for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, and our expert judges have been busy playing video games! This year we’ve received more than 4,000 entries in the following categories: Gamestar Mechanic, Gamemaker, Scratch, Unity, Open Platforms, and Written Design Documents.
Photo by Matt Roth for AARP
The STEM Challenge has hosted more than 35 game design workshops across the country for youth and educators. The energy at these workshops was amazing—read more about a youth workshop that took place at the Science Museum of Virginia. And we are thrilled to be hosting a series of intergenerational game design workshops with our partners at the AARP Foundation and Mentor Up. Check out this blog post about a workshop that took place at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and see some photos from another recent event at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
The winners of the fourth National STEM Video Game Challenge will be announced at an event in Pittsburgh, PA on June 27. Stay tuned for more information!
Learn more at stemchallenge.org »
Slideshow: Intergenerational Game Design Workshop
On Saturday, May 9, 17 kids between 8-18 years old joined a 50+ adult in their life (parents, grandparents, relatives, or friends) for a free, three-hour video game design workshop at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. hosted by AARP and MentorUp, E-Line Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Allison Mishkin of the Cooney Center, and Mark German of E-Line Media led the pairs throughout a workshop to discover the elements that make up any game — space, components, mechanics, goals, and rules — and the importance of finding the right balance with those elements to make a game fun to play. Groups of pairs joined together to apply these five elements of game creation to make up their own physical games using household and office supplies.
Then the pairs sat together at laptop computers to create their own video games using the Gamestar Mechanic game-based learning tool. All of the participants were engaged in the process of designing a game that they would like to play together. This event was part of a pilot series of workshops in multiple cities through June 28. See the events calendar at stemchallenge.org or mentorup.org for more information.
All photos by Matt Roth for AARP
Your Children Need Real-Life Video Game Escapades
Family Time with Apps is a free interactive guide for parents and caregivers that highlights some ways that families can use technology together. 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. 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’re thrilled to share Jordan Shapiro’s account of a recent road trip to Niagara Falls with his sons. Despite a relaxed screen time policy while on the road, the boys find that having uninterrupted time with Dad is more fun as they create their own adventures together.
Your Children Need Real-Life Video Game Escapades
My boys (7 and 10 years old) are not usually allowed to use electronics in the car. To them, I’m sure it seems like a weird, arbitrary restriction. After all, I rarely limit their screen time. They know that as long as they are also choosing to engage in other types of media and play—reading, LEGO, hiking, drawing, etc.—I won’t get involved in regulating the way they allocate their own time. We’ve talked about it many times before. I’ve explained to them that they need to practice and experiment and discover their own personal time management preferences.
Photo: Jordan Shapiro
Still, I usually take an uncharacteristically rigid anti-screen stance when we’re all in the car because I think it is important that they learn not to expect stimulation for short 20-30 minute drives. In our media-saturated, hyper-connected culture, I worry that my children could learn to think that they have the right to never be bored. On the contrary, kids (and adults) need to cultivate an appreciation for the aesthetics of boredom. Car rides offer an opportunity for just that.
Long road trips, however, are an exception to my no-screens-in-the-car rule. There’s a clear difference between an everyday commute and a six-and-a-half hour drive. There’s even a good lesson in proactive planning that they can learn as I encourage them to charge all their devices before bedtime so they’re prepped for the morning’s journey. That’s what happened on our recent road trip: I put the responsibility in their hands. I spent the few days prior suggesting they think about how they wanted to fill their own car time. They packed books, graphic novels, a few stuffed animals and their Nintendo 3DS consoles.
But I was surprised to discover that my kids barely touched the gaming devices, or the books that sat in the middle seat between them. First, we cruised from Philadelphia to New York City. Then, we headed northwest to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. During the 13 or 14 hours of total driving, all three of us mostly listened to Elijah Wood’s exceptional reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Please don’t roll your eyes. I assure you this is not some boring, clichéd blog post about how I managed to get my kids to put down the video games and participate in a culturally enriching experience of classic American literature. Let’s be real. Not only did they find that staring at screens while moving made them nauseous, their weekend also started in video game heaven. We spent a night in NYC attending the pre-release party for Nintendo’s new paint-gun-shooter: Splatoon.
The game is one of Nintendo’s most anticipated summer titles. Despite the success of shooter games like Call of Duty and Halo, Nintendo has always held fast to their family friendly commitment, resisting the violence. With Splatoon, they employ shooter mechanics but they avoid bullets and killings. Instead, the game involves paint guns. Players fight “inklings” to color the gameworld.
Photo: Jordan Shapiro
No, this was clearly not a literary vacation. Our family adventure really began in a room full of Wii U consoles, controllers in hand. The three of us explored Splatoon together, laughing and giggling and howling. We ate cupcakes and healthy organic hipster snacks while trying out all three of the game’s play modes: one-on-one, online multiplayer, and single player 3D platformer. Then my kids slid plastic parkas over their heads and shot paint-filled super soakers at life-sized canvases while running around in circles through a trendy Manhattan loft. They were so exhausted when we walked back to our hotel that the spectacle of Times Square seemed ordinary.
In the morning, our long drive began with a discussion about the game Splatoon. I asked them how they thought I should review it; but I already knew what I was going to write about the game. Really, I had an ulterior parenting motive. Encouraging kids to describe their gaming experiences in detail helps them to develop important critical thinking and rhetoric skills. Each time they exclaim that something is “cool,” I push them to expand on “why was it cool?” or “what’s so cool about it?” Eventually, they learn to intuit my expectations. Soon it becomes habitual for them to follow their observations and interpretations with evidence and support.
So the day started with lots of chit chat about video games. And by and by, we run outta things to say about Splatoon. So I switch Huck Finn back on the car stereo. I had forgot just how pleasin’ Mark Twain’s masterpiece really is. I reckon the conversation the three of us had o’er breakfast about slavery and religion and moral ambiguity was a little confusing to my kids. But they never had heard a first person narrative so fine. And Elijah Wood’s reading is just about as good as could be; I can’t recommend it highly enough. He sure does honor Huck’s voice. Young kids might miss the phil’sophical themes, but they’ll still be ‘sorbed right into the adventure.
Photo: Jordan Shapiro
After a few bathroom breaks and a stop for breakfast, we arrived at Niagara Falls. We darted from our hotel and did the full agenda of fallsview tourist attractions. Soaked after an into-the-mist boat ride on Hornblower’s Niagara Wonder, we dried off while taking a very long riverside walk all the way up to the Horseshoe Falls. My older son decided the tourists’ promenade was a good location for an imaginary inkling shoot-em-up paint-ball mission. So the three of us pretended that some of the other tourists were fantastical space-alien squids in covert human disguises; we ducked behind trees and sometimes pretended we were running away from color-snipers. “Niagara Falls is cool,” my kids declared as we rode the elevator back up from the underground tunnels, “but I’m not sure it’s worth such a long drive just to look at a bunch of water.”
I get their point. I’ve learned quite a bit after a few of these sight-seeing journeys—we visited the feral horses on Chincoteague Island last spring, and we hiked into the Grand Canyon this past fall. My kids love these trips, but I suspect it doesn’t really matter what we are doing. Vacations with little kids are fun and educational because they are a change from the ordinary. What my boys really enjoy is the undivided attention they get from me and the thrill of an adventure. It doesn’t matter whether we spend that time sightseeing, hiking, listening to books on tape or playing video games. The point is that we’re doing it together. We’re focused and engaged in a family escapade.
Photo: Jordan Shapiro
To them, it probably feels like the real life equivalent of when we sit on the couch together immersed in a multiplayer platformer. Travel is “Joint Life-world Engagement.” We discover new worlds, new challenges, and new experiences. We talk together about how things feel. The biggest difference between family life-world engagement and game-world engagement is that this trip was three non-stop days long and no matter how convincingly the boys beg, they can rarely get me to play New Super Mario Brothers for more than 30 or 40 minutes at a time.
Sure, Niagara Falls is a real life high-definition spectacular. But it is the uninterrupted dialogue with Dad that makes a trip like this appeal to kids. It is not just about bonding or feeling loved or spending quality time with a parent. Instead, it is about making meaning together—constructing a cohesive narrative collaboratively.
A large part of developing a sense of self has to do with learning how to articulate your own experiences in a way that feels comfortable and unique. Likewise, healthy relationships grow from learning to construct group narratives in ways that honor all of the participants’ voices. Just like parents and kids playing video games together, traveling together can provide an opportunity for young people to engage with adults and practice telling group stories in a safe and playful way.
Jordan Shapiro is the author of FREEPLAY: A Video Game Guide To Maximum Euphoric Bliss and the Mindshift Guide to Games and Learning and a Forbes columnist on game-based learning, education technology, and parenting. He lives in Philadelphia with his two sons and a video game console.
Four ways to tell if an educational app will actually help your child learn
Imagine someone telling you that a new technology would be available in five years that has the potential to revolutionise childhood and early education. But the downside is that you will have to choose from among 80,000 possible options. This is the problem currently facing many parents. Following the invention of the iPad in 2010, by January 2015 there were 80,000 apps marketed as “educational” in the Apple App Store alone.
We recently published a large-scale review of more than 200 articles on the question of how we can put the education back in educational apps. We used several well-worn principles that parents, educators and app developers can use to determine what is truly educational and what is simply masquerading as such. Here is what we found.
1. Apps should be minds-on, not minds-off
Have you ever used a GPS to drive to a new location but realised you have no actual knowledge of where you are or how to get home even though you drove there? Instead of actively processing the direction you were travelling in and the composition of the neighbourhood, you passively followed the instructions. Research tells us that these kinds of “minds-off” activities are precisely what you want to avoid when it comes to selecting educational apps for children.
In a study of word learning, children who actively used a process of elimination to figure out what object a new label was referring to showed better learning than those who were explicitly told that same information. Apps should utilise this kind of deeper processing. Before you download, pay attention to whether your child will simply be watching the screen or swiping flying fruit, rather than actively solving problems and thinking deeply.
2. Apps should be engaging, not distracting
Imagine you just opened the refrigerator door and your phone rings. When you get off the phone, you have absolutely no recollection of why you were in the refrigerator in the first place. These kinds of distractions take your attention away from what is happening around you, yet surprisingly these kinds of “bells and whistles” are precisely what many app developers include as “enhancements” in many apps.
A study comparing reading of electronic and traditional books found that when younger children read traditional books with their parents, parents talk more about the story and are less likely to direct the behaviour of the child, for example by saying “push that button”. Further, those reading the traditional book showed increased comprehension and were better able to remember the sequences of events in the story.
This difference is likely because electronic books may distract the child with “extras” such as sound effects or games and detract from the story itself. Apps can and should be “fun” but as a parent, you should look for apps that help your child to stay on task and not become distracted.
3. Apps should be meaningful
While learning the ABC song is an important building block, if your child doesn’t know that there are letters that relate to those sounds and that they form our ability to communicate, this knowledge is really just a song with no deep understanding.
Research from our own labs has shown that children learn better when their parents help them play in a way that helps them to build meaning. In other words, seeing triangles in pieces of pizza is more meaningful than simply seeing them in perfectly drawn shapes on a screen with the point always at the top. Apps that teach the letters or numbers are fine but it is crucial for children to know why this knowledge is actually important. They need to see the information in use.
4. Apps that involve social interaction support learning
Research repeatedly shows that the best resource for young children is not a fancy video, DVD, or even an app. Other humans are instead a child’s best resource for deeper learning. We looked at one study of children’s ability to learn the meaning of a new word from different formats. They were taught the word in a live interaction, a digital interaction (think Skype), or a straightforward video. The children learned the new information best when it was presented socially – so that people actually responded to them either live or on screen.
This is just one of the many studies that suggests that humans are the best at teaching other humans. While the idea of an app can sometimes seem inherently unsocial, newer apps hitting the market encourage children to play alongside their parents or other friends. Even feeling as if they have a social relationship with famous characters like Elmo or Mickey Mouse appears to help children feel connected and has the potential to increase learning and engagement.
Finally, one last thing to look for is the context in which your child is learning. When adults set up a learning experience where children are given the tools to solve a problem and the freedom to find the solution on their own, they learn much more.
By asking yourself a few simple questions, you can determine which apps are educational for your child and which might simply be fun.
Jennifer M. Zosh is Assistant Professor, Human Development & Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek is Stanley and Debra Lefkowitz Faculty Fellow, Department of Psychology at Temple University.
Roberta Golinkoff is H. Rodney Sharp Professor and Director, UD Infant Language Project at University of Delaware.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Reading with Preschoolers: Just Do It!
My hand tightly grasping my mother’s, I cautiously approached the low table and scanned its crowded top, gasping with a mix of delight and nervousness when I saw what my almost four-year-old self had been yearning for for what seemed like a lifetime: a crisp lined yellow card with a long piece of hot pink yarn attached at the two top corners, and my first name emblazoned in big black letters across the front. Proof that I was finally old enough to attend my library’s kids-only “Story Hour!” With the fuzzy yarn now tickling my neck, I apprehensively but resolutely left my mother and younger sister behind for the first time and followed a group of other yellow-card-bearers down a dark staircase into a bright, cool, cheery room, where a smiling librarian welcomed each and every one of us by name and invited us to sprawl out on a lush carpet. Books of all sizes, shapes, and colors were everywhere: stacked in several small child-sized bookcases, strewn across the floor, piled up haphazardly on the only chair, perched on the lowest steps. “What should we read today?” the librarian sang while sweeping one arm from right to left, and in spite of my lingering worry about how I’d find my way back to my mother, I knew in that moment I didn’t want to be anywhere else but right there.
As we celebrate Children’s Book Week 2015, I am sure many of us who work with children’s books professionally are spending some time reminiscing about the role that specific titles and even the genre in general have played in our lives. I consider myself very lucky that for most of my career, I have been involved in creating and sharing with others the very objects that have inspired and fulfilled me for as long as I can remember. Truly, I don’t remember a day in my life without books or the benefits that come from reading: pure fun and adventure, humor, knowledge, opportunities for self-reflection, life lessons, and innumerable other personal gifts.
As the Publisher at Sesame Workshop, the non-profit educational organization behind Sesame Street, I am often asked by new parents when they should begin reading aloud to their children. “From the day they are born,” I always respond. No, newborn infants won’t understand the story line or even the words in the simplest of children’s books, but they will benefit nonetheless from the exposure to language, the sound of their parent’s voice, and the extra parent-child bonding that comes from reading together.
At Sesame Workshop, our mission is to help kids grow smarter, stronger, and kinder, and books are one of our most well-traveled ambassadors. With the immense support of our many print and digital publishing partners, we distribute about 20 million books for preschoolers every year in the United States in a variety of formats: storybooks, board books, sound books, novelty books, coloring books, bath books, educational workbooks, and more. We strive to make books available everywhere so that wherever a parent prefers to shop, Sesame Street books are there. And if a parent wants to supplement print books with e-books and book apps, we have those, too, each carefully developed and researched with our young audience in mind. Because it is not the type of book that matters most but rather the act of reading together that yields the greatest rewards.
Children’s Book Week is a time to celebrate the joys of children’s books as well as to spread the word about the benefits children gain from reading from a very young age. At Sesame Street, we are cognizant of all the studies that show how important it is for children to be ready to learn when they get to kindergarten. Reading helps teach not only literacy skills but also the ability to pay attention and focus, which is essential to preschool learners’ success. We provide “parent tips” in some of our print and digital books to enrich parent-child reading experiences. Amongst our suggestions, which are based on our own research as well as that of other literacy experts, are to ask open-ended questions, point to words and pictures as you read, use character voices and sound effects to bring stories alive, ask children to predict what happens next, and follow your child’s lead (yes, it is okay to read the same page over and over again and to skip other pages entirely!)
Doing some or all of these things will certainly enhance the reading experience, but the best advice is simply to read together. No “how to” lessons or special effects are needed for you to create special reading memories with your child, and the more you read together, the more your child will learn and the more value your child will place on reading. Do it often. Do it consistently. Do it with a variety of book formats–don’t forget audio books, books of poetry and rhyme, and song books. Do it everywhere: at home, on vacation, at Grandma’s house, at the library. Do it with your favorite books from childhood. Do it with brand-new books you discover together. Do it with purpose and your complete attention. Most of all, do it with love, and you and your child will not want to be anywhere else but right there.
Jennifer A. Perry is Vice President and Publisher at Sesame Workshop, where she manages the development of print and digital books and book apps for preschoolers. She also oversees Sesame Workshop’s Publishing Archive of original Sesame Street book illustrations from 1970 to the present. Jennifer has been collecting children’s books since before she could read (thanks to her mother!) and boasts many first editions in her personal library. She has too many “favorite” picture book authors and illustrators to count, but among them are Beatrix Potter, Ezra Jack Keats, Gyo Fujikawa, and all of her 8 nieces and nephews, whose book art adorns every empty wall space in her bedroom.
