Are you looking for some good podcasts for children? We’re thrilled to introduce Podcasts for Families, a new series by Carissa Christner, a youth services librarian in Madison, Wisconsin. You’ll meet the producers of some of the liveliest podcasts for kids and learn more about the craft of creating engaging audio stories that families can enjoy together.

I have two children, ages 3 and 7, and over the past year or so we have developed a pretty serious podcast habit. Every time we get into the van, my son asks if there’s a new podcast episode to listen to. I love listening on road trips and when we’re commuting around town. Podcasts are a great way to strengthen listening skills (audiobooks are also excellent, but require a longer attention span than my 3 year old is currently capable of) and since we can all listen at the same time, they’re fun to talk about as a family. We’ve tried out a bunch of different shows and have some definite favorites that I thought I’d share with you over the next few months. Our tastes lean towards serially-told storylines with lots of sound effects, excitement, and a large dose of silliness. Read on for our first podcast recommendation, along with an interview its creator, John Sheehan.

Eleanor Amplified

Reminiscent of an old-time radio show, but with modern conveniences like cell phones, this podcast follows news reporter Eleanor Amplified as she works to expose corruption and fights for justice. With a nod to adult listeners with characters like “Conn Seannery” and other witty asides, this show will keep everyone entertained. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher.

1. Where do you make your recordings?

Thank you for asking about this! I record everything in the Fresh Air studio at WHYY. When I began making Eleanor Amplified, I was a producer on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, so it wasn’t just convenient, it was also a safe place for me to try things and experiment. I was at home in the studio, and had worked with the engineer, Audrey Bentham, for years. After EA Season 1, I changed positions at WHYY—partly to devote more energy to working on EA—but Danny Miller, Fresh Air’s executive producer, and Terry Gross still let me sneak into the studio to record. Which is amazing. Not only because it’s a great studio, but because it gives me a chance to visit with my friends at FA and an excuse to bug Danny and Terry who are two of my favorite people and incredible mentors.

2. Do you write all of your own material? How much, if any, is improv while you’re recording?

I write almost everything. Every so often in the writing process I’ll book some time with my old Fresh Air colleague, Sam Briger, and we’ll talk things out and he’ll give me feedback and push back if things I’m describing don’t make sense (which happens a lot). Once we’re recording there’s probably about 10% improv from the actors—which is sort of too bad, because they’re hilarious people and usually it’s a matter of me reeling them in so things still make sense to me story-wise. But one thing I really enjoy is that they always interpret the characters in ways that I wasn’t imagining, and that informs how I write the characters moving forward. Once everything is recorded, I usually end up cutting about 10% of the dialogue just to make things move faster.

3. How long does it take you to make one episode (all the way through from writing a script, to recording, editing and publishing)?

I get asked this a lot but it’s difficult to calculate the time to make one episode because I write, record, and produce them in big blocks. And I’m finding that the longest part of the process is the brainstorming. I write a season at a time, and have a general sense of what I want to happen, but then I have to break it down episode-by-episode to figure out the mechanics of it all. Once I have it all outlined, it takes me about a month to write, a month to record, and a month to produce. I wish I could figure out how to do it faster, but I have daily-job duties that pull me away from imagination land!

4. Do you have a favorite episode?

No… but I have a lot of favorite parts. I try to have some element in every episode (a sequence of sound effects, a montage, a jokey motif) that really stands out—I think of them as set pieces. Things like: the assembling-the-A-Team montage, crash landing the space shuttle, Bridget filming five movies simultaneously, disarming the nuclear copier—I could hear those scenes long before I recorded anything or arranged the sound effects, so putting them together was very satisfying.

5. Question from my 7 year old: You are awesome times 5! (He didn’t have a specific question, apparently he just wanted to say he loves your show.)

You’re awesome times 10! Thank you for listening, I really, really appreciate it.

 

Necessity is the mother of invention. When Mind Meets Music was awarded an Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) grant through the United States Department of Education in 2014, one of the grant requirements was to utilize technology as a vehicle to support learning. This mandate sparked an idea, sending the organization down the previously unexplored path of app development.

Though this venture into the technological realm was uncharted waters for our team, we’re no strangers to innovation. Mind Meets Music is an academic achievement program utilizing music to improve literacy skills and enhance brain development. Serving 5,000 students annually in the West Michigan area, we are committed to creating a quality learning experience and bolstering the success of underserved preschool through second grade students. Students at partnering schools receive direct instruction from our Master Teaching Artists with a music-based curriculum delivered in their classrooms for 30 minutes twice a week. The Mind Meets Music program is evidence-based, with independent evaluation showing a significant increase in math and English language arts proficiencies on state assessments for participating students. Building on these encouraging results, we recognized the potential for an app to cultivate the approach of music-based learning to expand our reach beyond the classroom and around the world.

On December 8, 2015, while researching app development, I stumbled upon a publication from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center titled Getting a read on the app stores: A market scan and analysis of children’s literacy apps. This overview of popular educational apps currently on the market included factors and features frequently present in highly-rated apps, and discussed beneficial components that were largely absent.

Through the Cooney Center’s publication, we learned that “Most apps do not mention various ‘benchmarks’ of educational quality, including education or child development expertise on the development team, underlying curricula, or research testing.” This inspired us to fill the gap by prioritizing research-based educational content, expert consultation, and beta testing in our app planning and design. The app was created with four different games of increasing difficulty, following the natural progression of phonemic awareness and reading fluency. Words were chosen carefully to maximize educational impact by exposing students to the words they would most frequently encounter while reading, utilizing Wylie and Durrell’s most common word families (rhyming words) and the Dolch Sight Words (most commonly used English sight words) Pre-Primer (Pre-Kindergarten) through Third Grade Lists.

Consultation regarding relevant research and appropriate grade-level progression of the Mind Meets Music App content was provided by Linda Pickett Ph.D., and Brian G. Johnson Ph.D., J.D., professors at Grand Valley State University’s College of Education. Candyce Peterson MA, CCC-SLP, speech and language pathologist, advised on the grammatical and linguistic elements of the content within the app’s games. The Mind Meets Music app was coded by David Prindle of Snow Monsters Studios.

Dr. Linda Pickett states, “This app is an excellent platform for diagnostic purposes. While playing with children, adults can easily recognize what children understand and are confused about. Those understandings allow for strategic scaffolding to support children’s learning.”

The app was released in April 2017, and community outreach has been essential, putting this free tool into the hands of the children, parents, and others who would most benefit from the app. Through our dissemination efforts we have had the privilege of partnering with The Cook Library Center, The Grand Rapids Public Library, Michigan’s Department of Health and Human Services of Kent County (MDHHS), and our local education agency partners.

As we serve vulnerable children in schools where high percentages of students fall below the poverty line, our collaboration with MDHHS has allowed us to connect with families in a space where they go for their basic necessities. I was welcomed warmly by Colene Johnson, the Community Resource Coordinator of MDHHS of Kent County and was allowed to disseminate the app in the lobby of the DHHS Benefits Room and the Children’s Reading Corner. In addition, Mind Meets Music was also granted the opportunity to partner in their Kent County Resource Fair. In a 12-week span we were able to reach 214 preschool and elementary students. Ms. Johnson states, “The app was useful in not only allowing students to learn while their parents or guardians are in line waiting to talk to a social worker, but a unique way to engage the youth in practicing reading outside of school.”

To date, the Mind Meets Music App has been download thousands of times in every continent except Antarctica, with over 1,000 downloads in China alone. We are excited to continue expand our reach, and to see the benefits as the Mind Meets Music App reaches a global audience.

The term ignite is defined as “to catch fire or cause to catch fire.” It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from, or what your current skill set may be. You just might be the necessary spark to ignite the next idea, or create the next piece of technology which will become a pillar of today’s society. If you have an idea or an innovative solution for the organization you serve, foster it, cultivate it, develop it—don’t be afraid to share these ideas with others and to stand on the shoulders of giants.

The free publications disseminated by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center will forever be linked to the Mind Meets Music App, as they provided much needed kindling during the conceptualization and development process, ultimately helping to launch an arts integration app aiding in the development of early-education students worldwide.

 

Jerry Wayne Newson holds a Bachelor’s degree in Management from Ferris State University. He has 10 years of experience in the music industry operating his own audio production company, which was invited to the Grammy Awards and selected as the RIAA Give the Gift of Music winner. Jerry Wayne has 6 years of experience in the nonprofit sector, and has been employed by Mind Meets Music, Inc. since 2014. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Grand Rapids Community Media Center.

The following excerpt from “More Than a Foundation: Young Children Are Capable STEM Learners” by Elisabeth McClure was originally published in the November 2017 issue of Young Children. It appears here courtesy of NAEYC.

 

 

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Two second-graders sit on their knees with quiet intensity, stacking unit blocks on a wide tower, higher and higher. A casual observer might think they’re simply enjoying the scale of their project and looking forward to knocking it down. Their teacher might see more, understanding that their activities are setting the stage for important spatial skills and physics concepts. Reaching as high as she can, one of the children drops a marble into the top of the tower, which is now over five feet high. Both children observe the tower intently. They hear a click, click, click, click, but no marble is in sight. The marble finally emerges from the bottom of the tower, rolling down a ramp and onto the carpet. The two children jump up and down, clapping and exclaiming, “Yay!” (The opening vignette is drawn from a video embedded in Revealing the Work of Young Engineers in Early Childhood, by Beth Van Meeteren and Betty Zan, available at http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/beyond/seed/zan.html.) 

What is easy to miss in this scenario is the engineering capacity already present in these two young children. The children had hidden in their tower a series of zig-zagging ramps—like the ramps in a parking garage—each placed at a precise distance from the previous one and stacked with care at alternating heights. In fact, the children had built and tested several smaller prototypes of the tower to determine the appropriate ramp distances. One of their key discoveries was that putting the ramps too close together resulted in too much marble speed (the marble would shoot out the sides of the tower), but putting the ramps too far apart resulted in the marble dropping straight down through the center of the tower. They worked collaboratively to get the design right, then they built the deceptively simple-looking tower on a larger scale with a complex, invisible inner structure (Van Meeteren & Zan 2010).

In the minds of these children, too, there was a complex inner process—one that is hard to see, which often results in adults underestimating young children’s current capacities. As new research shows, many people believe that “real” science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning doesn’t occur until children are older, and that exposure to STEM concepts in early childhood (birth to 8 years) is only about laying a foundation for the serious STEM learning that takes place later (McClure et al. 2017).

Many people believe that “real” STEM learning doesn’t occur until children are older. This couldn’t be further from the truth. A recent two-year research analysis found that young children are capable of engaging in, at developmentally appropriate levels, the scientific practices that high school students carry out (McClure et al. 2017). As one researcher explained, young children “can make observations and predictions, carry out simple experiments and investigations, collect data, and begin to make sense of what they found” (16). Even in the first year of life, babies systematically test physical hypotheses when they see something that doesn’t conform to their expectations (McClure et al. 2017). For example, researchers showed 11-month-olds a toy car going off the side of a table and appearing to float; the babies were more likely to observe the strange car for longer than normally behaving toy cars and to try exploring and dropping the car themselves (Stahl & Feigenson 2015). And, as the children building the tower demonstrated, young children are capable of using engineering habits of mind (e.g., systems thinking, creativity, optimism, communication, collaboration, supported persistence, and attention to ethical thinking) in their free-play activities (Van Meeteren & Zan 2010).

The research is clear: when we say children are “born scientists,” we’re not just being cute; they really are active scientists, right now, systematically and intentionally exploring their environments, even from the day they are born.

Read the full article here: https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/nov2017/STEM-learners 

 

Entry-level membership to NAEYC is $30 and comes with digital access to YC. See https://www.naeyc.org/get-involved/membership for more information.

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Please  visit appfairy.org for more information about Sago Mini.

Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast. My name is Carissa Christner. I’m very excited to have an interview today with Sago Mini, one of my favorite app developers. They’re a company with exceptional apps for very young users—even kids as young as two and three years old. If a family is looking for recommendations of apps that are good to use with that age group, I always recommend Sago Mini first.

In October of 2015, I had the great fortune of visiting the offices of Sago Mini in Toronto, Ontario. While I was there, I got to speak to a bunch of different people who worked on the Sago Mini apps.

One of the people that I spent a lot of time talking with was an illustrator named Aaron. He’s the artist who creates all of the artwork for the Sago Mini apps. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us Aaron.

Aaron: You’re welcome. Great to be here.

CC: Tell us a little bit about how you started making apps.

AL: We’ve been creating interactive media for kids for quite a while—actually, since before the iPhone, if anyone can remember back that far! Seems like we’ve always had iPhones. Back then, the problem was that using a desktop computer was not actually intuitive or easy for young kids. Older kids could do it—they could make the connection between moving something on a desk and then seeing something move on a screen. But younger kids couldn’t. Preschoolers couldn’t really make that leap. 

When the iPhone came along, it opened up opportunities to create touchscreen work for preschoolers, which almost no one was doing at that point. We were one of the first companies to do that. And then when the iPad came along a few years later, the larger screen opened things up even more. That’s some of the how and why we got started.

CC: You started off with a different name, right?

AL: Yes, the company was originally called Zinc Roe. Sago Mini apps were originally called Tickle Tap Apps. I designed the first characters back in 2009, I think. In 2013, we paired up with Toca Boca. They are our sister studio based in Sweden. And at that point we became Sago Mini.

CC: Do you have any stories about where or how you found inspiration for any particular app?

AL: Our apps are inspired in any number of ways, but two that stand out for me would probably be Doodlecast and Babies. Doodlecast is an app to let the user draw and record audio at the same time. The inspiration behind this is very simple, based on an observation that when kids drew pictures they wanted to make up stories about the drawing and describe the narrative. I mean, who hasn’t seen a little kid do that? They tell you what they’re drawing, they tell you the story. That simple but pointed observation was the inspiration behind it—to let you both draw and record audio. 

Babies, on the other hand, is an app in which you can play with baby versions of our four main characters. It was inspired a few years ago, when we were all out having lunch in a park, which we do a lot in the summertime. One of my colleagues saw a bulldog puppy, and I remember hearing her say, “We can have an app about babies!” It was literally as simple as that.

CC: I love that. One of the things that I like about Doodlecast is that it’s got some really subtle elements that make it different. I really like that you have Jinja the cat sitting in the corner of the screen and you can see the back of Jinja’s head, sort of like Mystery Science Theater 3000, and he’s watching—or she? Is Jinja a boy or a girl?

AL: We call her a girl. 

CC: Okay, so, she is watching the screen. And when the little video of the drawing and the audio is done, she turns around and cheers, giving you a bit of positive feedback. I think that subtle detail is really genius, because it helps kids feel like they’re interacting with someone within the app—it’s not just them talking to themselves.

AL: Absolutely. And what kid doesn’t love an audience, right?

CC: Exactly.

AL: I remember putting on “plays” for my parents and their friends. So I think having Jinja as your audience, in addition to mom and dad and whoever else you might be playing with, just adds that little extra level of relatability for a kid.

CC: Can you tell me a little bit about how the artwork for your apps was made? When I visited your offices I was super excited to see all of your sketchbooks…

AL: I was a freelance illustrator for 18 years before I started working at Sago. Drawing in sketchbooks for me is, and always has been, second nature. I’m very old fashioned that way. There are a few steps in the process of how art gets into an app, starting by sketching out the idea on paper. As you noticed, I’ve got multiple sketchbooks for drawing. I like to have a record of the stuff that I’ve done, and when you draw on a tablet, it’s not as easy to have that record.

CC: It’s true. I love [seeing] the whole row of your sketchbooks on the shelf, it’s really exciting to see all the different artwork you’ve done.

AL: Yeah, everything that’s ever been done for Sago Mini exists in those sketchbooks. I know you’re a librarian, too, so we’re both a little biased. Both my parents were librarians, so I’ve got a soft spot for library books and librarians in particular.

So anyhow, after sketching out the drawing on paper, then I scan the sketch, and send it to one of our production artists. The production artist takes that scan and uses it as a template to create what’s called “vector artwork”using Adobe Illustrator. Once this artwork has been built, the production illustrator sends it to the technical artist who prepares the art.Then things can go a couple of ways. If it’s static art which doesn’t move, such as the background, she will integrate it directly into the app at that point. However if the art needs to be animated, say it’s a character, she will forward the art to our animator, who uses a program called Animate (formerly was known as Flash). The animator then sends it back to the technical artist who integrates it into the app. There’s a lot of back and forth, but it slowly moves ahead in that direction.

CC: Can you tell us a little bit about your app testing process? I know you guys do a lot of that with kids.

AL: Yeah, we were actually doing that earlier today as a matter of fact. We had five families in here. Our secret sauce is play testing. It informs everything we do and it is indispensable for us. Every few weeks we have kids come in with their parents and our play designers and toy designers sit down with the kids to play with the apps or toys that we’re currently developing. It’s completely non-scripted and routinely offers a wealth of information as we observe how kids are actually using what we’ve made. It’s really easy when you’re developing an app to get into your own groove and start making assumptions that kids will use it a certain way—and we don’t want to do that. For example, if multiple kids are having trouble at the same spot in an app, if they’re confused or they just don’t want to play with it, we know we have to go back and rethink certain areas.

We have a little camera that we attached to the iPad so we can see what the kids are doing based off of their hands. We record what they’re doing and analyze it afterwards, seeing where they were succeeding, where they were failing, where they were having trouble. It’s completely indispensable for us as we develop new ideas.

CC: Have you ever had an app get to the testing stage and realized that the whole thing needs to be scrapped or totally revamped?

AL: [Laughs] We’ve never done that, though we’ve definitely put the brakes on halfway through, after having done a lot of work, and we’ve had to go back and start from certain points again. That’s more of a production issue. We’re getting a lot more into doing very solid pre-production now, so that doesn’t happen as much. 

CC:  It’s apparent to me that you do this really thorough app-testing process, because I’ve played other apps where I sit and watch my kids play it for the first time. And if both my 2-year-old and 6-year-old get stuck in the same spot, that’s not their fault. That’s something that’s not right with the design of the app.

AL: Exactly. And if you test early for that kind of thing—there’s that “old saying” in app development—test early, test often. And that’s what we do. We absolutely don’t want to encounter those problems with kids being confused once we’re done. We just never go there.

CC: And you do all of your testing in your offices?

AL: Yeah, it’s all here. We have some nice comfy coaches and a table of snacks and big massive stuffed versions of the characters that are like five feet tall. It’s a very inviting space. A lot of kids actually don’t want to leave. They start crying when they have to. It’s such a fun place to be, it’s kind of like asking your kid to leave Santa’s workshop, you know, after you’ve taken them there.

CC: How do you recruit kids for that?

AL: We have a mailing list and a lot of word of mouth. They’re all local families. We actually turned four years old officially last week, so we’ve built our mailing list up over the years. It’s taken a while, but that’s basically how we do it.

…

CC: About how long does it take to develop an app from like idea to in the App Store?

AL: At least four to six months. I once told that to a bunch of kids, and they couldn’t believe it. They thought it was maybe a couple of weeks.

I often compare making an app to making a movie or a film. It brings together so many different kind of developmental elements. There’s the brainstorming, the idea phase, the pre-production, the production, the artwork, the development, and then the testing, and then the submission, and the marketing. And so there’s so many different kinds of input that go into the things that it is often—they’re like little sort of movie productions. At least that’s the way I look at it.

…

CC: One of the important concepts that librarians and researchers are trying to share with parents when it comes to sharing apps with kids is something called joint media engagement. It’s a fancy way of saying playing apps together with children, or using apps in a way that will build relationships between people rather than putting up walls, like having a screen in front of your face can sometimes do. Have you heard of this concept? Does the Sago Mini team keep this concept in mind as they are developing new apps? 

AL: I hadn’t heard of that phrase, but it is actually one of our central tenants. [Our audience is] little kids, who, ideally, are playing these apps with their parents. We really do consider this, and bring it to life in a couple of different ways actually.

CC: Tell us about that. 

AL: I’d say first, we try to be mindful of the fact that kids like to share moments of humor or accomplishment by showing their parents what’s happening on the screen. So we try our best to have our apps encourage this. Whether it’s the game mechanic—some fun way to move your hand around the screen that does something funny, or it’s the constant, for example with Doodlecast, the app where you can draw and record audio. Kids love to show their parents their drawings and have their parents be part of it, and then play it back and have a good laugh… We really try to let the app contribute to that desire for kids to share what they’ve done.

The second way is that the play pattern of an app can directly encourage multi-user playing. So kids would be encouraged to play it with other kids. For example, we have an app called Friends which is sort of like a play date. You pick a character and then go knocking on your friend’s door and you go on a play date with them. You can have two characters on the screen at the same time, and you can have one kid playing with one character and another one with another character. It encourages kids to play with each other instead of just by themselves.

CC: So each kid can control a different character at the same time?

AL: Yeah. And this is natural because it supports the idea of the app about playdates, and playing with your friends. I guess that the last way [we promote joint media engagement] would be that each app comes with a letter to parents, which you access on the main screen, and we hope can inspire discussion between kids and their parents about the content and the kinds of stories they might tell about it. 

So we always try to leave room in our apps for the user to bring their own interpretation of what’s going on. Ideally the letter to parents can act as a bit of a catalyst for them to talk with their kid about the app, and how they might imagine what’s going on. For example, if if they’re in the forest and in the Fairy Tales app, where are they going? And now Jinja the cat is dressed as a knight—why is she dressed as a knight? What’s she going to go do? So that’s the third way that we try to encourage joint media engagement.

CC: I love it. And honestly those letters to the parents. That is one of the elements that I look for when I discover a new app developer—I check out their info page to see if they have done anything to communicate with parents about why they developed an app a certain way or if they have suggestions about ways to play together because I think that is super important. I love that you guys do that on your own apps. Aaron, thank you so much for coming on to the show today.