Apps en familia ya está disponible en español

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En diciembre del año pasado publicamos Family Time with Apps, un libro electrónico diseñado para ayudar a los padres a comprender mejor cómo las “apps” móviles (aplicaciones para teléfonos y tabletas) pueden apoyar el desarrollo saludable de los niños, como el aprendizaje, la comunicación y las conexiones en familia. Esa guía tiene como objetivo mostrarles a los padres cómo encontrar las mejores aplicaciones para las necesidades de sus hijos, proporcionar consejos sobre cómo (y por qué) usar las aplicaciones juntos y sugerir recursos que hagan el proceso de elegirlas más fácil y más divertido.

Una parte importante de la misión del Joan Ganz Cooney Center es difundir información basada en la investigación científica. Cuando lanzamos Family Time with Apps, recibimos buenas reacciones y también muchas solicitudes de los bibliotecarios y los líderes comunitários que nos preguntaban si existía una versión en español. Con mucho gusto anunciamos que Apps en Familia ya está disponible. El libro está disponible en dos formatos, los dos totalmente gratuitos:

Esperamos tu opinión sobre este recurso gratuito, que se puede descargar aquí. Por favor compártelo con tus amigos, colegas y organizaciones comunitarias a quienes pueda interesar.

Apps en familia: Guía para usar apps con tus hijos

 

 

Available now in Spanish: Apps en familia!

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Last December, we published Family Time with Apps, a free guide designed to help parents better understand the variety of ways that apps can support children’s healthy development and family learning, communication, and connection. The iBook aims to show parents how to find the best apps that fit your child’s needs, provide tips on how (and why!) to use apps together, and highlight even more resources that will make the process of selecting apps less overwhelming, and more fun.

An important part of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s mission is to make sure research-based information is made available to the largest possible audience. When we released Family Time with Apps, we received some great feedback, but also many inquiries from librarians and community organizers who wondered if there was a Spanish-language version available. We’re very pleased to announce that Apps en Familia is available now! The book is now available through Apple’s iBook Store for those with access to the iBooks app on a desktop, iPad, or iPhone with the latest iOS, or as a PDF in English or Spanish.

We would appreciate your thoughts on this free resource, which you can download here. Please spread the word and share this with friends, colleagues, and community organizations who might find this content helpful.

Meet the Winners: Lance Dugars

Lance DugarsA long-distance runner, 13-year-old Lance Dugars knows how to go the distance. This very drive to cross the finish line helped him create The Brink Walker, the winning Middle School Gamestar Mechanic entry in the National STEM Video Game Challenge.

Lance, from Katy, TX is an avid Gamestar Mechanic user who has been interested in video games “for as long as I can remember.”

When he started creating his own games, Lance started experimenting with tools that would let him rapidly and freely prototype the many ideas he had in his head. Gamestar Mechanic was his favorite because “it doesn’t limit you as much as other [game design tools]. Gamestar Mechanic lets you have as many levels and make as many stories as you want.” Lance has used the tool’s flexibility to create wild stories and immersive experiences.

Brink Walker LogoMany of his creations are inspired by the games he likes to play. Lance believes it is important to play a lot of other games and understand their diversity in order to be a great designer. His favorite games are massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) like Destiny or Skyrim because they “there’s always something different and a new challenge to accomplish.”

Lance loves the sustained engagement from “games that take awhile to think and plan.” He prefers these to games that are short and don’t require intense concentration and focus. Through seemingly never-ending play and player-vs-player (PVP) experiences like League of Legends, Lance challenges himself to make friends, strategize and “think about what I’m doing.”

The skills and community garnered through game play fuel his involvement with  Gamestar Mechanic’s active playtesting community. He loves to interact with other designers to get ideas and help them better use the tool and regularly hosts contests and organizes discussions to encourage other users to create their own games and make friends. “Some stop playing, but I’m still active,” he says. “I like playing others’ games and helping other users improve.”  The community also helped him refine his game, which took about three months to create.

While the community provided support, Lance got the idea for The Brink Walker from his science class. “I had started out wanting to make a time travel game, but then we were watching videos about alternate dimensions and other cool stuff,” he says. “I thought it would be cool to put what I was learning into my game.” The story and art began to flow once he started working it.

It is not surprising that Lance got his idea from science class, as this is his favorite subject in school. He loves “doing the experiments and stuff in lab. They’re so much fun to do.” Lance loves to create in the physical and virtual world. His favorite experiment involved a design challenge where they had to build a bridge to withstand a large amount of weight but built only out of sticks, straws, tape, and glue. His bridge could hold up to 70 pounds!

This love of creating inspires Lance to keep going and supporting other designers. “It takes a long time, sometimes you want to quit,” he says, “especially if working by yourself. But keep working on it because it will be worth the effort when you finish it.

We’d imagine that Lance takes this same attitude to the races he runs on his school’s cross country team. The long distances relax him as he gets in the zone and pushes his body to run as far as it can. He also plays french horn, making him one of the many STEM Challenge winners to play an instrument.

Lance continues to design games, inspired by playing the other winners’ games and visiting Schell Games in Pittsburgh. There, he learned more about what a game design company looks like while people are working there and how fun it could be. When he grows up, he wants to “be a game designer and design MMORPG games because I’ve been thinking of one that I could make ever since I started making games.”

Fueled by what he saw in Pittsburgh and the ongoing support of the Gamestar Mechanic community, Lance knows he will get there. He just needs to keep racing towards the finish.

Meet the Winners: Cole Nutgeren

Cole NutgerenLike most 13 year old boys, Cole Nutgeren has diverse hobbies and interests, like playing the piano and fencing. But unlike many kids his age, he takes a systems thinking approach to everything he does and likes to think about the building blocks that make these systems run. It is this approach that helped him design the Best Middle School Scratch game for the 2015 National STEM Video Game Challenge award.

Cole was immediately hooked on Scratch when a friend introduced him to the tool. He taught himself to use it mostly by “messing around with the editor and learning through experience.” He has also relied on the active Scratch community to learn tips and to get exposure to the tool’s limits. And he says that while the ability to create his own games first got him excited about Scratch, it is the community that keeps him engaged. “They’re the main reason I still use it,” he explains. “It is so fun to look at the other games out there and people give you frequent feedback. It helps to make your games way better.”

This active playtesting community helped Cole refine his design skills. Playtesting is how a game designer tests a new game for design flaws, bugs, and that elusive “fun” factor. Cole turns the playtesting process and his sharp eye for detail on his own work and says his game isn’t complete until “I can play it and get into flow without a thought in the back of my mind about fixing a click.” He also gives a lot of feedback to others within the community because he really enjoys the playtesting process.

During the STEM Challenge awards weekend in Pittsburgh, Cole was able to demonstrate his playtesting skills during Schell Games’ design day. Many of the designers commented that he had a unique eye for design and he even gave his mom some tips on “how to give feedback” so she could playtest as well!

But Cole enjoys more than the challenges of playtesting. He talks of algorithms and level design and loves exploring these complex ideas through Scratch’s easy-to-use interface. When designing a game, Cole begins by creating individual “engines” or mini-algorithms for each element in his game to ensure that they run smoothly. He then creates a macro process to tie it all together. Once he has “tied all the complex things” together, he can focus on what most people find fun: level design, characters, and more! In this way, working with Scratch and the Scratch community, Cole “taught [himself] through experience” many complex game design principles.

Now that he understands the framework, he is eager to learn more programming and technical skills. Cole recently began learning Java and C# because “Java is similar to scratch and helpful for future careers, but I can do more exciting things with C#. They’re both similar to Scratch and I now feel ready for them.” While Cole wishes there were a computer science class in school that could help him grow his technical toolkit, he is grateful for the writing and arts classes where “you can do whatever you want along the vague guidelines. It’s why I like games…I get to experiment with everything.”

Cole is also an avid Minecraft player. He likes that it caters to many aspects of what he likes in games, but he thinks it is important to play a wide variety of PC and indie games because he gets inspiration from playing other games.

Given his experience with all aspects of the design process, from ideation through playtesting through release, Cole has astute advice for budding designers: try all of your ideas. “If there’s anything in the game that you want to happen, just try it and see if it makes it better. Don’t not try just because it might be hard. Your instincts probably turn out really well.” And Cole’s certainly did with Pyromania, his winning game. He spent seven months creating and iterating on his design and more than three months of that was spent creating the main engine. But he followed every hunch and tested many algorithms with the community to create a polished and engaging game.

Texting Parents to Get Kids Ready 4K!

During my teaching career, I taught pre-K in high-poverty areas in the District of Columbia, but I also taught for a year in a high-income, suburban area in Maryland. There was a stark difference in students’ vocabulary and background knowledge. Most of my students from a low-income background didn’t have the breadth of vocabulary that some of my higher income students possessed.

Although this was my own personal experience, it is backed up by research which says that by the age of four, poor children in the United States hear 30 million fewer words than children from middle- to upper-income families. The importance of this statistic cannot be overstated. By the time children are in fourth grade, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 80% of children from low-income households are not reading on grade-level.

Whether we call this the “word gap” (a phrase that rankles some experts) or use some other terminology (could it be replaced with a less-deficit-focused buzzword?), the need is the same: Children of all socio-economic levels need to experience language-rich conversations with caring adults to become not only literate, but also able to think critically about the world around them.

Over the past few years, a growing number of early education programs focused on building literacy skills are seeking to address this issue at an early age with the help of technological tools.

Ready 4K! is one program that shows evidence of succeeding at closing the word gap. The program focuses on building parent knowledge by sending text messages explaining how to help build children’s literacy skills. The program primarily promotes early literacy and language, but also is piloting texts that target other early learning skills, such as socio-emotional learning and early math.

In 2013, Ben York and Susanna Loeb of Stanford University piloted Ready 4K! in the San Francisco Unified School District to help close the word gap between affluent and low-income children. The text messaging program targeted low-income families with four-year-old children.1 Through the use of a randomized controlled trial, the program showed significant gains between families that had received the targeted early literacy text messages and those that received the placebo messages that, for instance, may have just alerted parents about vaccination requirements for kindergarten. Children who received the early literacy text messages gained an additional two to three months of learning in some areas.

In the U.S., the ubiquity of text messages across the economic spectrum is one of the reasons that Ready 4K! has been successful. In the randomized trial, York and Loeb found that 80 percent of the low-income families in the study had unlimited texting plans, which made text messaging the easiest, most convenient, and least expensive form of communication. Text messaging is low-cost, easy to scale, and an effective tool in changing parent-child interactions, incrementally.

Parents in the tested group became accustomed to receiving three messages per week, and were excited to learn about new ways to build their children’s skills. For instance, according to survey responses collected by the researchers, one parent said, “It helps us to prepare our preschoolers for kindergarten. This should be [sic] our first kiddo going to kindergarten and [we are] unsure of what he should know before reaching “k.” Ready 4K! text give me guidance.” The program is also successful because it is based on the premise that all parents want their children to be prepared for school. Given the right tools, and in partnership with effective educators, parents can help close both word and achievement gaps.

Although there is growing excitement about the use of text messages and other forms of technology in the early education sector, researchers, like York, advise caution. Creating high-quality text messages that can help improve children’s early literacy skills as well as foster a positive parent-child interaction is difficult task. If other early education programs want to start a text messaging program, York advises: “Really take your time and develop a high-quality program that includes an understanding of children, an understanding of parents, and an understanding of human behavior.”

Currently, Ready 4K! is expanding the use of its text messaging program across the United States and internationally. Versions of the program have been created to serve families that speak home languages other than English. The program is now available in Spanish, Arabic, Haitian Creole, and Chinese. Because the word gap can begin as early as 18 months, York also plans on expanding the program to children, zero to three years old. As Ready 4K! expands, the program plans to conduct additional randomized trials to determine the efficacy of each version.

 

Last year, New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center started documenting programs like Ready4K! in a blog series called Seeding Reading. Over the coming year, we are starting a broader project — Integrating Early Literacy in Technology (InTEL), which includes an interactive map to show where these programs are located, how they work, and what evidence of impact they have started to collect. Watch for more about our InTEL project in the coming months and let us know what you think.

  1. Nearly all parents in the study received financial assistance for preschool. http://www.nber.org/papers/w20659