Empow Studios brings technology, arts, and play together to help young learners discover and build on their creative talents. They teach classes in programming, robotics, video game design, animation, design, audio engineering and other creative skills for the 21st century at over 20 locations in Massachusetts. Many of the students enrolled in their summer programs are designing games that are eligible for submission into the 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge.

Lynne is now a full-time tech instructor while pursuing a teaching degree.

When 22-year-old Lynne Richman had her first taste of STEM camp, she was 12 years old and hadn’t really had a chance to explore technology. “The camp was called ‘iCamp,’” she recalls. “It was a week-long day camp where you picked a project at the beginning of the week and the counselors helped you to finish it and improve upon it throughout the week.”

At the time, Richman was excited about what was then a novel idea. “It was the first and only camp I ever went to where I got my own laptop for the week and a chance to experiment with and learn new and fun software,” she says. “I honestly loved it. It gave me the chance to be creative in a medium that I had always felt comfortable in and it opened me up to new experiences and new connections with like-minded kids.”

Fast forward ten years and Richman is teaching at the same camp, now called ‘Empow Studios,’ where she is employed as an instructor. Her job involves teaching kids how to complete projects while tapping each child’s potential and allowing them the freedom of self-expression. ‘I love seeing how excited they get about the stuff they’re working on and hearing their ideas for elaborate additions and future projects, no matter how impractical they might sound,” says Richman. “It inspires me to be exposed to their unadulterated creativity and passion.”

A Career Evolves
“Some of my favorite technologies that I learned about at camp were the home design and video game design software,” says Richman. “It was so fun to learn about how to design my own house and customize all aspects of the furniture. Additionally, learning about how to design and program video games, albeit simple ones, was incredibly interesting and fun, not to mention educational.”

Richmann says she didn’t realize that the programming skills she was learning would be extremely useful later on as a college freshman at Rutgers University in New Jersey. There she was required to take a programming class for her math major. Beyond the programming, she also developed a love of teaching at the camps, which really took shape as her formal ‘camper days’ were winding down.

“Mostly I just didn’t like the thought of having to leave camp behind me,” she recalls. Fortunately, when she was sixteen and had aged out of the program as a camper, she was old enough to be a junior mentor, and then was later employed as a junior counselor. “I jumped at the opportunity to be a part of the awesome environment,” she notes. “As a camper, the counselors had always made me feel accepted and included and had encouraged me to be creative and push the limits of my own abilities to continue to grow and challenge myself. It was such an exhilarating experience and I really wanted to be a part of making it happen for others.”

Richman’s involvement with kids and technology began to shape her career path. “Working at the camp, I realized how much I really enjoyed the teaching experience and it led me to pursue teaching in other forms and settings, such as tutoring and eventually pursuing a degree in math education, which I’m currently working towards,” she notes.

Tips for Teaching
Currently, Richman’s days as an Empow Studios instructor start with campers trickling in and heading straight to their projects to continue where they left off the day before. “I remember that feeling of excitement and dedication; there is always more to add and improve upon and it can be exhilarating to feel so much ahead of you,” she recalls. As the eager campers begin work, Richman instructs each child on how to make their ideas come alive, while allowing them the freedom to forge ahead on their own.

“My advice to get kids interested in a concept or topic is to really get to know them and learn what they are genuinely interested in and then see if there’s some way to combine or mix in their interests with the concept,” she notes.

Richman also generates interest among students by showing them some of the projects she’s in the process of creating, which often includes games or artwork. “I like to show the kids what I’m working on because I’ve found that it inspires them to see what is possible after years of experience and learning the programs,” says Richman, who is quick to encourage others who may be interested in a teaching career.

“If teaching is something that you want to do, then it is absolutely something you should pursue,” says Richman. “The world can always use more wonderful teachers! Behind every great scientist, leader, engineer, etc. is a teacher that helped them mold their talents and skills and perhaps even inspired their pursuits to begin with. You never know the impact you can have and it certainly never hurts to try.”

In addition to working as a technology instructor, Richman is working towards achieving her Bachelor’s Degree in mathematics and then plans to pursue a Master’s Degree in education. “My current goal is to finish up my degrees and find a good teaching job near family,” she says. “Long-term: my goal is to be as happy as I can be and make those around me equally as happy.”

Now a camp instructor, nine years ago, 13-year old Lynne Richman (right) and a fellow camper made a TV ad to promote a video game they had created during their stay at iCamp (Empow Studios)

Educators and researchers have long argued that engaging families and making connections between home and school learning are key elements that foster children’s academic success and strong communities. In communities where parents may have had few educational opportunities themselves, or may have been educated in very different systems outside the U.S, it is especially important to build a common understanding and empower families. To help address this need, Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD) in Chula Vista, the largest K-6 school district in California, pioneered participatory design with parents in order to create a mobile app that helps connect home and school for the nearly 30,000 students attending 45 schools.

The project began in 2014, when leaders at CVESD were expanding their technology infrastructure in the hopes of connecting more children and families to achieve learning goals. The district serves a diverse community adjacent to the US-Mexico border; close to half of students receive free or reduced lunch, and 35 per cent are designated as English learners. School leaders gained a unique window into district families’ technology practices, beliefs, and challenges when they opened their doors for a qualitative research study conducted by Dr. Vikki Katz, Associate Professor of Communication at Rutgers University and Senior Research Fellow here at the JGCC. With a team of bilingual, bicultural student assistants, Katz interviewed over 60 students and their families, unearthing rich data around families’ media practices and the potential disconnects between home and school (Katz, González & Raynal, 2015). While working with Katz’ team and learning about families through her research, CVESD’s Executive Director of Technology and Instruction Matthew Tessier and colleagues created an app for families. The app’s design was rooted in insights gained from the interviews with families, as well as direct input from parents about the kinds of functions they needed.

Screenshot from the Chula Vista Elementary School District App

Through Katz’s research, the district learned that there was work to do to provide digital equity in the community. Many families were accessing the Internet—not through terminals at school, but from mobile devices at home. “The information from the study made us realize kids are going home and the access they have to the Internet is really through a mobile device,” recalls Tessier. “Making parents and kids go to a web page at a terminal [in the school] wasn’t the best thing to do because the research was telling us we were isolating half of our community.” The research also drove home the point that children, particularly in immigrant families, “broker” knowledge for their parents—helping them access and understand online information. Tessier and his team realized that in order to forge the vital home-school connections they hoped for, there needed to be opportunities for families to access information together at home, including information on parent-teacher conferences, what food is being served at school, services families need, direct communication with teachers, and other functions.

One vital insight the CVESD team learned from the research was that their technology needed to be mobile based—98% of families in the study had and used mobile devices at home to access the Internet, whereas access via other types of devices was much more varied. Given the initial insight to create an app, the CVESD team engaged the community to ask what they’d like to see in the tool. Among top priorities were to enable easy email messaging with a child’s teacher. Access to the school calendar was also a practical necessity, as families in this border region often spend time in Mexico during school breaks. Families also requested the ability to notify the school of absences via the app, add school events to their personal calendars, and access school lunch menus. Now in operation for over a year, the Chula Vista Elementary School District app currently provides all of these features, and CVESD is looking to assess how families are utilizing the app in order to iterate on and expand its functions.

On May 31-June 1, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America co-hosted Fostering STEM Trajectories: at a two-day event in Washington, DC. Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education and former Vice President of Asia Society, delivered these remarks on how an international perspective on STEM education for young children may benefit our research and practices.

FIRST: Why thinking internationally ought to be part of our national research agenda in STEM and early learning.

Vivien Stewart speaks at the Fostering STEM Trajectories forum at New America on June 1, 2016. Photo: New America

Most American educators know that on international assessments, US students perform poorly compared with students in other industrialized countries. On OECD’s PISA assessment of 15-year-olds in 2012, the US ranked 17^th in reading, 21^st in science, and 26^th in math. And while the US used to lead the world in high school graduation and college attendance rates, we are now 15^th in the world in college completion rates. In a globalized world where high skills and the ability to innovate are critical to sustaining a high wage economy, these numbers are obviously concerning.

International research has moved beyond these kinds of simple horse race rankings between countries to trying to understand why some education systems produce better student outcomes than others; how some systems achieve both greater excellence and greater equity; and how some are moving further toward the kinds of 21^st century skills and inquiry-based learning we think is needed for effective STEM education. Time doesn’t permit me to go into these findings, and you certainly need to address international research with greater nuance than does the press. Culture and context have to be taken into account: you can’t just “cut and paste” a practice from one system to another. But a growing body of international research speaks to the issue of a lack of systemness (referred to in the background paper*) as a key issue for lower-performing systems. High-performing systems, no matter what culture or world region they are in, find ways: to create a long-term education vision that is sustainable across political cycles; to align different parts of the system—such as curriculum, teacher training and assessment—so that they work together; to focus time and resources on building front-line capacity; and to involve other sectors in supporting children.

(The US is already building on the findings of international research in certain areas.  For example, by looking at secondary school curriculum standards worldwide, we learned that the expectations we set our students were not high enough—which led to the development of the common core state standards in math and ELL.  Similarly, research on some of the world’s best modern vocational education systems in Switzerland, Australia, and Singapore, for example, has led to major efforts in California to design modern vocational education systems based on the principles in these models. And research on the types of assessment systems used in other countries has led to increased recognition of the limitations of assessments used in the US and some experimentation with other forms. So we have already learned some valuable lessons from international research.)

SECOND: What have we learned about the teaching profession from international comparisons?

For the last six years I have been one of the organizers of an international summit on the teaching profession, which brings together ministers of education and leaders of teachers’ organizations from about 25 industrialized countries.  What we’ve learned is that while some countries, including the US, have difficulty recruiting high-quality graduates into teaching and have high attrition rates from the profession, other countries have a plentiful supply of good teachers, high retention rates, and stronger student learning outcomes.

The highest performing countries have, over time, developed a comprehensive and career-long approach to the teaching profession: taking deliberate steps to attract people into the profession, raising the rigor of teacher preparation programs to equip  teachers with strong subject matter skills as well as clinical experience, supporting every new teacher with a trained mentor for the first two years, and providing effective forms of professional development in school by master teachers. The latter is one of the most striking finding of the international research on the profession. Take Singapore as an example. In addition to every new teacher having a mentor, every teacher is a member of a teaching group in their school. These groups meets weekly to share the work of lesson preparation, to collectively examine student progress and diagnose student learning needs, to provide regular observation and feedback on classroom teaching, and to pilot and evaluate new approaches to issues in the school.   Teachers advance up a career ladder with increasing responsibility based on their teaching skill and their effectiveness in helping other teachers. And the most senior teachers play a role across the district, researching problems, often in conjunction with university faculty, spreading best practices and innovations to other schools, and, in particular, working on improving the quality of teaching in schools that are lower-performing.  These ideas are not unfamiliar in the US, where they are often known as “professional learning communities”, but in higher performing systems, these school cultures of active collaboration, classroom observation and feedback have become the norm rather than something that is an occasional or light touch thing.   

In some places, technology is now being added to these systems of professional learning, for example for sharing lesson plans digitally or by using electronic means to enable master science teachers to help lead professional development for teachers in rural or disadvantaged schools where science expertise might be in shorter supply. Singapore is a highly developed model and perhaps a special case, but a number of European countries and several Canadian provinces are moving toward this kind of continuous improvement system. I believe that this kind of a continuous improvement system, with incentives to keep improving performance and collaborative reinforcement of expertise, could help to significantly lift the quality of the early childhood workforce as well.

THIRD: What are some insights about STEM learning from international research?

Most of the research I’ve been discussing has looked at the effectiveness of systems as whole rather than looking at math and science specifically.  But there are some intriguing insights about STEM. For example, according to TALIS (a survey of teachers in 34 countries), compared with teachers in other countries, US teachers at the lower secondary level have much lower levels of numeracy than teachers in most industrialized countries. If our secondary teachers are relatively low on numeracy, you have to assume that our elementary and pre-K teachers are even lower. In addition, a number of high-performing countries have specialized math and science teachers at the elementary level or have a certain number of elementary teachers who have majored in math. It would be interesting to know what kinds of math skills elementary teachers in higher performing countries have. If our goal is for US children to learn to think mathematically and scientifically rather than memorize terms or algorithms, what kind of math and science skills (as well as child development and pedagogical skills) do our pre-K and elementary teachers need to possess in order to have a deep enough understanding to correct misunderstandings or differentiate instruction?

With respect to equity, we know that large numbers of American children fall behind on literacy and math by the end of third grade and that they never catch up.  It would be interesting to look at some other countries that have developed different approaches to early intervention. For example, in Finland there is no special education system, but there are special teachers who begin to work with children as soon as a teacher feels they are missing a concept rather than waiting until they fail an end-of-year test before they are assigned for special help.  Similarly, Singapore has systematic extra help available to students in literacy and math from the day they enter school.  Are there any best practices in the US or in other countries that could reduce the number of students who are turned off math so early?  Or, since many countries don’t have as marked gender differences in math and science as the US, are there best practices elsewhere that could help to promote greater interest in math among girls?

Learning goes both ways. For a long time, other countries have sent their educators to the US to learn how to emulate our inquiry-based teaching approaches. But rather than keeping them as pockets of excellence, as we do, they tend to spread them across the whole system. This is easier in those countries that have strong national or state-level authority in education. But since many education systems around the world have become highly decentralized, often down to the school level, they are also finding other mechanisms for making best practice systematic—such as the kind of continuous improvement system mentioned above and the creation of networks across schools.

Most of the studies I’ve referred to have been at the K-12 rather than the preschool level, where there has been relatively little international research beyond descriptions of system organization. Lynn Kagan is embarking on a major international study of early childhood education systems around the world, and this could be a platform for studies more focused on STEM trajectories.

The next round of PISA assessments will be released in Washington in December 2016, this time with a particular focus on science and on equity. This highly visible event could provide a good platform and starting point for an agenda on fostering STEM learning in the early years.

*A background paper on STEM in early learning was shared with participants at the convening. It will be published by the Cooney Center and New America in fall 2016.

Vivien Stewart is Senior Advisor for Education and former Vice President of Asia Society. Over the past ten years, she developed a series of international research projects and benchmarking exchanges to share expertise between American, Asian and European education leaders. She writes extensively on education internationally. Her book, A World-Class Education, describes what the U.S. can learn from high-performing systems around the world.She was previously Director of Children, Youth and Education programs at Carnegie Corporation of New York, an education philanthropy, where she shaped agendas in early childhood and adolescent development, science education, urban school reform, and teaching as a profession. She was also a Senior Policy Advisor on Education at the United Nations.  She serves on the boards of ACT, EDC, and the National Center on Education and the Economy.   She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Oxford University.

Steve Isaacs teaches video game design and development to middle school students in New Jersey, and has been recognized as an ISTE Outstanding Teacher this year. Here he shares his experience in developing a curriculum in game design at his school, and offers tips for educators interested in doing so at their own schools.

Steve Isaacs with students at William Annin Middle School in Basking Ridge, NJ
(Photo/Stuart Ramson for Microsoft)

When I started teaching at William Annin Middle School (WAMS) in 1998, I offered an after school computer club that focused on Game Design and Development. For the most part, we used an early version of GameMaker. It was great to watch students stay with the club through their three years at the middle school. One student even worked on the same game for all three years, continuing to iterate and add additional levels, game mechanics, and further developing the story. His game, “Ball” became a cult classic at WAMS. It became apparent that there was incredible learning taking place. Students were fully engaged, and taking learning into their own hands in order to add desired elements to their games.

Fast forward a few years. I was asked to teach the seventh grade Gifted and Talented program at school. I saw this as an opportunity to bring game development into the regular school day, at least for this group of students. It made sense as this provided an enriching activity that could tap into their creativity. The students in the program created non-digital games as well as digital games.

They engaged in an iterative design process. They first created a design document to serve as the roadmap for their game. They created the prototype of their game and had their peers test it. Then they made improvements based on feedback. After engaging in the iterative design cycle and feedback loop several times, they created the final version of their game.

Game Design and Development: Pedagogically Speaking
I became increasingly excited about the learning potential of game design and development. At the time, I was primarily teaching technology courses like Web Design, Programming (where I was able to sneak in some game development), Communication Technology, and our more traditional Computer Cycle. I approached my supervisor with the idea of offering a full semester eighth grade elective in Game Design and Development. He was immediately on board and we moved to speaking with my building principal. To my utter delight, she quickly supported the idea. She trusted our plan to provide an engaging approach to introducing students to computer science in addition to the host of other skills that we highlighted as our learning objectives.

Game development could potentially be the most authentic approach to interdisciplinary learning. There’s really something for everyone. The activity lends so well to the creation of design teams with roles including storytelling/narrative, graphic design, animation, sound engineering, project management, and programming. It is also very important to note that game design taps so nicely into the realm of 21st century skills.

21st Century Skills according to Thoughtful Learning
https://k12.thoughtfullearning.com/FAQ/what-are-21st-century-skills

The Learning Space

I have learned a lot over the years. In fact, I would say that I completely reinvented myself as an educator. Many of these lessons came from my observations of myself as a learner as well as my daughter (and other students in informal learning spaces). I am essentially self taught. There are tremendous resources out there and I absolutely love to learn. My daughter probably learns a lot like most kids. When she wants to learn something, she seeks out whatever resources she needs. We live in a world of on-demand learning. YouTube, online wikis, tutorials, etc. abound! Whatever you want to learn is just a few clicks away. I have become a strong proponent of leveraging the way kids (and adults) learn in informal settings. I have learned to put the responsibility of learning on the learner. My role is to support students in the process. I provide resources and some instruction, but teaching kids how to learn is much better than teaching kids to rely on a teacher as the expert. Minecraft has certainly been a big factor in this shift. Students come to the classroom as the expert when it comes to Minecraft. I had to let go of control and embrace this fact. (You could read more about my experience letting go here. ) It has been nothing short of wonderful to create a space where I can learn with and from my students.

A student works on her game in Steve Isaac’s game design class at William Annin Middle School in Basking Ridge, NJ
(Photo/Stuart Ramson for Microsoft)

This brings me to the important point that with game design, the tool is not important. It’s much more about the process. I have strived to create a studio environment that provides a variety of resources. My strength is teaching the iterative design process. As I mentioned, I provide some direct instruction, but most of my instruction is related to the process. I am a firm believer that magic happens when we give students choice and autonomy. Choice in this context can relate to the role a student plays on a design team, choice in the type of game a student chooses to create, choice in the tool the students select, and certainly choice in terms of the type of game the student chooses to develop. When students have choice and agency in their learning, we can help them find and nurture their passion. Game development provides this opportunity, especially when students are in control.

What about the tools?

There are a number of great tools / game engines to consider for sure. I have used Gamestar Mechanic, GameMaker: Studio, and Minecraft extensively with my students.

Gamestar Mechanic has been a wonderful tool for the seventh grade Game Design and Digital storytelling course, which is only six weeks long. All objects in Gamestar Mechanic are pre-programmed. The game designer can adjust the settings of the objects in the game, but the emphasis is not on coding. This works well in a course where the focus is learning about game design elements and creating a narrative.

GameMaker: Studio has been one of my favorite tools for many years. GameMaker requires the developer to program all objects in the game. There is a drag-and-drop approach which is great, as it beautifully models the syntax of a programming language. In addition, there is a full programming language, GameMaker Language (GML) which students can learn in order to program their game with code. It provides for a more flexible and robust development environment. My focus in teaching GameMaker is on the drag-and-drop approach but I have had many students learn GML independently. In fact, one of my students and I co-authored a book that was published in January 2016 on GameMaker Programming with GML.

Minecraft is an incredible game design engine. It is fascinating how this game has taken the education world by storm! The game certainly was not created as a game design engine, but it might be the most flexible game development environment I’ve found. Minecraft includes elements in the game that lend well to game creation. Redstone and command blocks allow game developers to automate functions in the game in order to create fully functional games. Minecraft has a variety of ways to build in narrative as well. Possibly the most amazing aspect of Minecraft when it comes to game development is that it is the only tool I have found so far that (due to the multiplayer capability) works well as a collaborative design tool. Teams can work together in the same world at the same time. Furthermore, everyone is so engaged that I rarely (maybe never) students shirking responsibility and allowing other members to do the majority of the work like you might see with other tools. In addition, the potential to organically form roles within the team is remarkable to watch. Some kids are amazing with redstone, while others are great at building. The fact that kids can coordinate together and develop sections independently that come together so beautifully is pretty awesome!

The National STEM Video Game Challenge

For the past five years, my students have participated in the National STEM Video Game Challenge. I believe strongly in having students publish their work to an authentic audience. Students participating in the challenge get to submit their game. It definitely gives students something concrete to work for in addition to publishing their completed game to some of the online communities like the Gamestar Mechanic Game Alley. I would definitely encourage you to offer this opportunity to your students as part of class, an after school program, or even a lunch bunch.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have. Happy to support you in getting a game design and development program started at your school!

Steve Isaacs teaches Video Game Design and Development at William Annin Middle School in Basking Ridge, NJ. In addition, he developed and teaches an online version of the Video Game Design and Development course for the VHS Collaborative. He is the co-founder of #EdTechBridge, a twitter chat and community working to build collaborative relationships among EdTech stakeholders to create better EdTech for our students. The #EdTechBridge chat takes place every Wednesday night at 7pm EST. He is also one of the founding members of the #games4ed initiative and a moderator of the weekly #games4ed chat held on Thursday nights at 8pm ET. He can be found on Twitter as @mr_isaacs and is happy to connect with other educators who are excited about game based learning and Game Design and Development in education.

As a member of the Support Team for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, I often receive many emails from students looking for guidance, such as a recent request from Yoel in Dallas who was looking for tips for young game designers thinking about entering a game for the 2016 cycle.

Based upon my experience as a professional game designer and a screener for many of the STEM Challenge game submissions, I thought I’d share my personal recommendations with all of you as well:

• Study math. LOTS of math. You know how in math classes there’s always that one kid who asks, “When are we ever gonna use this?” The answer is in coding and programming, which game design requires a lot of. Focus on Algebra as a starting point and branch out from there.

• 

  Watch Extra Credits on YouTube

  Beyond having a solid math background, there are many resources out there for people who want to learn how to be better designers, for games or otherwise. I would personally recommend the books, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, and the video series Extra Credits, available on Youtube at https://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz.

• Inspiration can come from anywhere, so don’t be afraid to use personal interests or hobbies as a starting point for your ideas.For example, did you know that Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and many other games, got the idea for the game Pikmin while he was gardening, after seeing how ants would gather around large objects and work together to lift them? Always keep your eyes open!

• In the words of Mark Rosewater, current head designer for Magic: The Gathering, “Restrictions breed creativity.” Many people, when presented with the option of creating anything, get overwhelmed and end up doing nothing. If you put restrictions on yourself that you must follow, whether they are creative (ex. “My game must have a Steampunk theme”), mechanical (“My game should be in first-person”), or technical (“I need to use the Unity game engine to create my game”), you often end up creating something far more interesting than if you just tell yourself that anything goes.

• Teamwork and communication are key. If everyone in your group is not on the same page regarding what kind of game you are making, it will most likely end up disjointed and unfun. Creating a game design document that anyone can add notes or comments to can be very helpful, as are regular team meetings.

• Understand the scope of your game. You only have until August 15, 2016 to enter your game into the STEM Challenge, so you won’t have time to create something massive with lots of different gameplay elements. Try to find one specific mechanic you’d like the game to focus on and build around that and only that. It’s better to have a short but complete game rather than a massive but unfinished one.

• Know your audience. One of the biggest pitfalls for new designers is remembering that you’re making a game for a specific audience, NOT yourself. This is especially true when it comes to difficulty—you’ll be playing your own game a lot and become an absolute master at it. Something that seems easy or straightforward to you may be incredibly difficult for someone else. This is why having playtests of your game where folks who haven’t played it before try it out is very important!

• Iterate, iterate, iterate! Game design is a never-ending cycle of building something, testing it out to see how it plays, and then going back to make changes. Your final product may end up being far different from what you originally envisioned, but never be afraid to make changes, no matter how radical, if it means a better game.

Hopefully this advice will prove useful to you as you work on your STEM Challenge game! If you have any other questions, send us an email at stemchallengecontact@stemchallenge.org. Good luck!

Joey Glatt received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Game Design at DigiPen Institute of Technology. Currently he is a Community and Technical Support Specialist at E-Line Media for Gamestar Mechanic and MinecraftEdu. His favorite games include Super Smash Bros., Uncharted, and Magic: The Gathering.

Flickr / Sarah Joy

Picture this: You enter a preschool classroom and hear the splashes and giggles of children around a water table. You approach an elementary school and see a small group of children on a guided nature walk, investigating the blossoms on a flowering tree, while another group is measuring the dimensions of a jungle gym and creating drawings of how it is constructed. All around you, early learners are engaged in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) — subjects that were once seen as too “hard” to teach young children but which are now recognized as critical to weave into their growing understanding of the world.

Research on the early childhood years (birth through age 8) has spotlighted how children’s environments and interactions with adults become catalysts for children’s growth and development. This has prompted questions among policymakers, practitioners, and researchers on how to ensure those years are filled with opportunities for all children to explore, investigate, and see themselves as learners. It is even more critical to provide vibrant learning environments for children from underserved communities and in vulnerable families. What needs to change to ensure that richer learning experiences are provided in today’s child care settings, pre-K centers, and elementary schools? How can researchers, policy makers, and practitioners work together to ensure that all young children have access to high-quality instruction and learning environments?

So begins the background paper on STEM and early learning that I had the honor of co-authoring with Lisa Guernsey, Doug Clements, and the Frameworks Institute. These two paragraphs represent so well what I’ve had the opportunity to learn over the course of working on this project: Young children can and should experience joyful, contextualized, and developmentally-appropriate STEM lessons; early childhood teachers, similarly, need joyful, contextualized, and developmentally-informed STEM education in their own pre- and in-service training in order to support their students effectively; and researchers, policy makers, and educators must collaborate to bring this vision to reality.

How do we get a movement of this kind off the ground? Back in April, I had the honor of attending the White House Early STEM Learning Symposium, where participants discussed the incredible power of STEM learning in early childhood and made individual commitments, led by the Obama administration, to support this powerful area of opportunity. The symposium inspired great energy and a motivation among attendees to take action.

That’s why, on May 31 and June 1, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and New America convened leaders from research, policy, philanthropy, and practice, to follow up on the White House symposium and create a national action agenda for early STEM learning. Participants arrived well-prepared, having read a background paper—referenced above and prepared specially for the event—which reviewed the research on STEM and early learning; the state of the early childhood workforce with respect to STEM teaching; policy issues; an analysis of major research funding in the area; and an important set of recommendations from the Frameworks Institute on how to effectively communicate about early STEM to the public.

L-R: LaRue Allen, Kimberly Brenneman, Andres Henriquez, Shelley Pasnik, and Deborah Phillips.
Photo: New America

The convening, funded by the National Science Foundation and hosted beautifully at New America, was a two-day event featuring moving and informative talks from celebrated experts and leaders—including Deborah Phillips of Georgetown University, Joan Ferrini-Mundy of the National Science Foundation, and Nat Kendall-Taylor of the Frameworks Institute—as well as a presentation by two top members of the Obama administration, Russell Shilling and Libby Doggett, who discussed their agenda following the April White House event. The event also included several hours devoted to breakout discussions. The participants’ task: To bring their diverse experience and expertise to the table to help address some of the major barriers preventing high quality STEM education from being effectively implemented in early childhood classrooms. We also asked participants to make suggestions for research funding organizations to help create a new research and development agenda over the coming years.

L-R: Michael Levine, Doug Clements, Mike Smith, and Vivien Stewart.
Photo: New America

Attendees had the choice of six discussion groups, and after discussing their topics for an hour, they reported back to the whole group for a priority-setting session. Their insights included:

• We must think of STEM learning across the early childhood years as a continuum, and reduce the degree to which research, practice, and policy tend to divide up infancy/toddlerhood, pre-K, and K-3 children into siloed areas of study, standards, and curricula.
• We must consider the importance of teacher working conditions and student diversity to this issue, and all issues related to early childhood education.
• We must include home-based care in our consideration of early childhood STEM education.
• We must include informal learning environments, like libraries and museums, in our strategy to bring early STEM learning to all young children.
• Teachers and school administrators need to be involved collaborators in the design phase of studies in order to produce research that is applicable and scalable in the real world.
• We must consider the child’s and the teacher’s encompassing ecologies more holistically in order to be effective. We must involve parents and families, school administrators, and other members of the community from the beginning, hearing their voices and needs, to make important changes stick.
• Researchers must make a greater effort to disseminate their findings where teachers are already looking for information. This includes practice journals and websites like Pinterest.

This is just one small sample of the wonderful recommendations made by the remarkable attendees. We also welcome comments and ideas from you all, our readers: What priorities we should be considering? What do you think are the barriers to bring STEM learning to young children? Please send your thoughts to cooney.center@sesame.org.

So what’s next? With this feedback in hand, we will revise the background paper into a major report—which will include a national action agenda and a formal set of recommendations for funding agencies – to be released and widely disseminated in the fall. With the support of the truly extraordinary attendees at our event, as well as the building momentum and interest in early STEM learning in the policy arena (following on the heels of the White House event and our own convening, there was also a Congressional briefing on this topic on June 10) we are very optimistic that our efforts will indeed help foster STEM trajectories for America’s youngest citizens.

To learn more about this event, please see Deepening Discussion of STEM for Young Learners, Part 1 by Kristina Rodriguez.

We’ve teamed up with our friends at Jossey-Bass for a Goodreads giveaway! Enter now for a chance to win a copy of Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens by Lisa Guernsey and Michael H. Levine now through July 8, 2016.

Learn more about the book at TapClickRead.org and learn more about the giveaway here.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Tap, Click, Read

by Lisa Guernsey and Michael H. Levine

Giveaway ends July 08, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

Photo: Heather Mallak

The synergy in Pittsburgh that extends across three rivers, regional institutions, learning spaces, and communities in support of local youth was in the spotlight during May 9-15, 2016. Remake Learning Days was a bold vision to bolster over 300 events that took place throughout Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia with a culminating family-friendly rally at PNC Park, home of the Pittsburgh Pirates. All week long, Pittsburgh partied. We learning party partied. School marching bands welcomed visitors to open houses, fab labs demoed tools and techniques to parents, and hundreds of youth hand-built spectroscopes while dozens of game design students from across the city were introduced to the National STEM Video Game Challenge.

Thanks to generous funding from The Grable Foundation as the Regional Spotlight Program Sponsor, the STEM Challenge has returned to Pittsburgh in 2016 for a second cycle. Building upon last year’s STEM Challenge, the Pittsburgh Community Accelerator Project seeks to link regional and national efforts, deepen research and educational impact, and expand access to underserved communities. For Remake Learning Week, the STEM Challenge joined the celebration of innovations in learning by facilitating a series of video game design workshops for youth.

On Monday, May 9, I joined Susan McCoy for her classes at the Pittsburgh Gifted Center, a campus that hosts students from across the Pittsburgh Public School District. Susan has taught game design skills to hundreds of students over the past 14 years as part of an elective course that uses GameMaker, and we were delighted to share the STEM Challenge with her students throughout the week. Sabrina Culyba, Senior Game Designer at Pittsburgh-based Schell Games, one of the largest independent game studios in the U.S., joined us for this STEM Challenge workshop.

After I introduced the STEM Challenge to the class, we dove into Gamestar Mechanic as a design tool that students could use to create their own games. Sabrina reviewed the students’ games, observed debugging techniques (similar to those used by her coworkers at Schell Games) and talked about career paths. Each day of the week, I joined Susan as she taught a different group of students, who represented schools from throughout Pittsburgh. The students were evenly split between boys and girls, newcomers and seasoned gamers. A few were already familiar with the STEM Challenge, having attended a workshop at their local library or a summer camp at the Carnegie Science Center last year. Many were excited to learn that the 2016 STEM Challenge’s deadline is on August 15, and planned to continue working on their games for submission at the end of the summer.

We got some great feedback from the workshop series. Susan said that she felt that our presentation made her students feel that the work they are doing in their game design class was valuable. “Even though we use different software to create games, the idea of systems, components, rules, and space still apply,” she said. “The students appreciated that they are on the same track as professional designers.”

This event was one of many that will be held locally in the coming months as part of the Pittsburgh Community Accelerator Project. Please visit the Upcoming Events calendar on the STEM Challenge website to learn more.

Heather Mallak is a multimedia artist, informal educator, DML Competition winner working on Public Studio, her latest project. She serves as the Regional Coordinator, Pittsburgh Community Accelerator Project, supporting the STEM Challenge.

Photo by Kris Krug

When Derek Lomas learned that 50% of 8th grade students in the United States can’t put a series of fractions in order from least to greatest—a skill that’s generally taught to students in 4th and 5th grade—he knew that something needed to be done. “Fractions are often the mathematical sticking point for kids because it’s the area where math truly gets hard for the first time,” Derek explains. “Without a firm grasp of fractions, students have a hard time learning algebra and developing strong number sense.”

To combat this challenge, Derek and his partners Dixie Ching and Jeanine Sun developed Numbaland, a collection of four video games that equip children from kindergarten to 4th grade with skills that solidify their understanding of number concepts. Featuring games like Battleship Numberline and Angle Asteroids, Numbaland won the Collegiate and Impact Prize in the inaugural 2011 National STEM Video Game Challenge.

An early iteration of Battleship Numberline, one of the winning Numbaland games.

Getting Started with Game Design

Numbaland was far from Derek’s first foray into game design. In 2008 he co-founded Playpower.org, an educational software development nonprofit based in San Diego, California. Working with a team of over 100 volunteers from around the world, Playpower set out to create a low-cost computer that could provide an affordable connection to learning games in developing countries, funded by a Digital Media and Learning grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

The result of Playpower’s efforts? A suite of educational games compatible with a $12 8-bit computer that operates similar to classic Nintendo systems, equipped with a keyboard and mouse, and running graphics through a family’s existing television screen.

“Our purpose was to show that hardware was not the bottleneck [in developing countries],” Derek explains. The team found that while the technology might be older, they were ultimately able to make low-cost computers and software broadly accessible. “Now it’s a matter of different access instead of no access,” says Derek.

Capitalizing on New Momentum

Flash forward to December 2011: Following Numbaland’s National STEM Video Game Challenge win, Derek co-founded Playpower Labs, the next iteration of Playpower.org. “Winning gave us the impetus to scale with access to new connections and resources,” he explains.

Now with over 35 educational game designs under their belt, one of the crowning achievements of Playpower is Fraction Planet, an app based on educational competencies from the Common Core that won an app design competition with the NYC Department of Education in 2013.

With over one million downloads of their latest app Math Planet, Derek and the team at Playpower have a distinct advantage when it comes to researching efficacy—an immense and engaged sample size. “We’re able to automate experiments, test different elements of the game and curriculum rapidly, and ultimately, get kids into the ‘good’ experiment conditions more quickly,” he explains.

Playpower’s app Math Planet was featured in the Kids section of the Apple App Store.

Inspiring a Smarter Approach

“What’s exciting is using research to discover something new about motivation and learning,” says Derek. “We’ve found that the harder something is for kids, the more they fail, and the less time they want to spend doing it.” Instead, Playpower focuses their designs on increasing difficulty over time through effective leveling, maintaining the novelty and incentivizing game play with engaging design elements.

Now with a diverse collection of games to his name, Derek is focused on digging deeper into the way that design as a whole informs his game concepts. “When I think about game design, I also think about motivational design,” he explains. “I’m thinking about ways to make educational games more engaging and delightful.” He recommends that aspiring designers take a similar approach in thinking about the motivation behind gameplay, and pick up a copy of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman for more inspiration.