If you follow the news or have a child in school, it’s easy to believe that science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) concepts are more prominent than ever before. And certainly, the importance of STEM learning and STEM experiences are enjoying a renaissance of media coverage.

The reality is, however, that our children have always been capable of STEM learning, yet we are just now learning more about how and when to encourage this type of thinking in a way that sets the next generation up for future success. For too long, educational practices and adult-child interactions have been influenced by the assumption that children cannot think logically, despite a wealth of research challenging that idea.

In our new publication, The Roots of STEM Success: Changing Early Learning Experience to Build Lifelong Thinking Skills experts from the Center for Childhood Creativity (CCC) at the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) detail the critical importance of sharing STEM experiences with the youngest learners, children ages 0-8.

Through the review of more than 150 empirical studies, the authors of The Roots of STEM Success reached conclusions about early STEM learning that are echoed in the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s own report, STEM Starts Early. Namely, that children can grapple with STEM concepts even before their first birthday, and need to be exposed to these critical learning experiences during this stage of development. Both publications suggest too that parents, teachers, and other caregivers need to be better prepared and empowered to share these learning experiences with young children in both formal and informal learning spaces.

The Roots of STEM Success shares six key findings designed to help parents, informal and formal educators, and other caregivers understand the importance of an early STEM focus. We know that children’s earliest experiences lay the foundation for their lifelong creative problem-solving and thinking skills and shape their approach to learning. It is vital that we get this message to the community charged with raising this future generation of global citizens.

Part of that process is sharing practical, actionable tips that adults will feel comfortable putting into practice during their interactions with young children. In their authorship of The Roots of STEM Success, CCC experts considered how they might translate the research they reviewed into experiences that would make sense for daily life and could be implemented in both formal and informal education spaces, including schools, homes, and community centers, among others.

Some of these tips, such as providing time and space for make-believe play or asking “WH questions” (such as why, what, and how) may be things that some parents and teachers are already doing. Others, such as praising children for their effort rather than their ability and adopting a “love of mistakes” may be completely unfamiliar.

What The Roots of STEM seeks to do is present all these tips in an approachable way, so that caregivers can feel equally comfortable implementing those that are the most familiar and those that are completely new to them. The tips are also shared in a way that empowers adults to understand why they are important to STEM learning. For instance, a tip encouraging adults to use conceptually rich vocabulary with their children—describing a block tower as “stable” or a pair of socks as “matching”—connects this practice with the way babies develop language.

All of the publication’s practical tips are backed by research, and CCC experts see them implemented everyday through the work of the Bay Area Discovery Museum. Because of the partnership between BADM and the CCC, children at the museum’s site are able to engage in creative, research-backed, STEM-based programming on a daily basis.

Visitors to BADM—from infants at Tot Spot to children in our Science Lab programs to the parents and adults that accompany them—are exposed to creative learning at every turn. While we are grateful to have this space to share these STEM-based programs and activities, we know that more needs to be done to allow all children to access these critical learning experiences, so they can reach their full potential later in life.

What the CCC ultimately hopes to achieve—through publications like The Roots of STEM Success, local and national speaking engagements, and the creation of practical resources—is a rethinking of STEM education. Our current definition and understanding must expand: to recognize learning spaces other than traditional classrooms; to identify more opportunities to share meaningful STEM experiences; and, most importantly, to include our youngest learners from their first years of life.

To read The Roots of STEM Success: Changing Early Learning Experiences to Build Lifelong Thinking Skills, along with other CCC publications, please click here.

 

 

 

Helen Hadani, Director of Research for the Center for Childhood Creativity, authors original research on creative thinking and child development, including the Center’s latest report The Roots of STEM Success, to create evidence-based tools and resources for educators and parents. She launched and manages the Center’s onsite research lab at the Bay Area Discovery Museum and partners with U.C. Berkeley and Stanford University to conduct empirical research on cognitive, social and emotional development, with a focus on creative thinking and problem solving. She brings more than 18 years of experience in research and education settings, including years in the technology and toy industries conducting research with parents and children to develop innovative products at Hasbro, Apple, Leapfrog, and LEGO. Helen received her doctorate in Developmental Psychology from Stanford University and has taught at U.C. Davis and San Francisco State University. She is the co-author of a chapter on research and museum partnerships in the book Relating Research and Practice: Cognitive Development in Museum Settings.

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Visit appfairy.org for more information about Nosy Crow.

Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast. My name is Carissa Christner, and I’m a children’s librarian from Madison, Wisconsin. Each time that we have an App Fairy podcast, I interview a different app maker in a sort of meet-the-author format.

Today I’m very excited to introduce you to Kate Wilson, Managing Director of Nosy Crow.

Kate Wilson: Thank you so much for having me, it’s a real pleasure.

CC: So your offices are located in London. Can you tell us a little bit more about the area?

KW: So we are! We’re in a part of London called Southwark, which is quite near London Bridge.

CC: How did Nosy Crow get its start? Did you start out just with books or with apps?

KW: We started almost simultaneously with books and apps. Our first book came out in January 2011 and our first app came out in February 2011. We were a young company and from the beginning it was a good thing to have a digital component to what we were doing.

CC: Nice! Do you feel like the apps create a larger demand for the books, or do the books create a larger demand for the apps? How would you say the two are related?

KW: In some ways I don’t think they are terribly related, at least most of the time. What I feel very strongly now—and I didn’t feel this at the beginning, this was not Plan A—but what I feel very strongly now is that the way you tell stories on screen is, and should be, and must be, different from the way you tell stories on the page. I’ve watched too many children kind of jab disconsolately at a screen hoping something will happen when it’s really just a book that’s got some bells and whistles and that somebody has kind of forced onto a screen.

What we’re trying to think about is how to tell stories brilliantly on screen. That’s question one [for us]. And question two, how do we tell stories brilliantly on the page? I actually think I’m a better print publisher for young children now, having had a lot of digital experience, than I was before I started, because I think very hard about what the page can do—the printed page—versus what can the screen do—and how those are different.

Sometimes in the case of characters like Bizzy Bear or Pip and Posy, we’ve created apps that are not the same as books. We’ve tried to use characters that children may be familiar with in book form and bring them to the app screen, or characters children may be familiar with in app form and then make books available with those characters in them too.

CC: I’m really interested in this concept that you’re talking about, how a book really is very different when it’s on the screen versus when it’s on the page, because that’s something that I’m becoming much more aware of too as I really study book apps. Can you tell us a little bit about how that process has evolved for you, from the very first app that you guys did, The Three Little Pigs?

KW: The Three Little Pigs is one of the more linear story apps that we have. But even from the beginning, many of our current design principles still apply. We felt very strongly that reading must not be the most boring thing that a child could do on the screen. And we wanted there to be genuine interactivity.

For example, in The Three Little Pigs, when the reader blows on the screen (and into the microphone), then they can help the wolf to blow the houses down. We think that children have really high expectations of what happens on screen. They expect it to be properly multimedia, so that means we’re also composing music that is very non-linear. When you compose or commission music for audiobooks, there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you know how long it’s going to last. When you’re commissioning music for apps, you don’t know how long the child is going to spend on a particular scene. You have to have something that loops, but loops subtly.

There was a whole set of things we were thinking about in terms of multimedia and interactive expectations that children have of screens that informed our storytelling for fairy tales from the very beginning. I think you can see that in The Three Little Pigs, though in subsequent apps we’ve thought even harder about what it is possible to do with a screen that isn’t possible on the page.

CC: I think you guys have done a really groundbreaking job of exploring those different capabilities that a screen has. I love how in your version of Goldilocks and Little Bear, you’ve got Goldilocks’s point of view in one direction. But then if you flip the screen the other direction, it’s Little Bear’s point of view. I think that’s a fantastic use of the capabilities of the device itself.

KW: Yes! I mean, that just felt like something that you couldn’t do in a paper format. Another good example would be Little Red Riding Hood. When we were researching Little Red Riding Hood, one of the very early stories was from Provencal, France. In that story, Little Red Riding Hood meets a werewolf, not a wolf, but a bzou, which is the Provencal word for a werewolf. And the bzou in that version of the story says, “Will you take the path of the pins or the path of the needles?”

That prompted in our heads this idea of a branching path in the woods, creating almost like a choose-your-own adventure. So [in the app design] each choice that you make as Little Red at a fork in the path through the woods then affects how the story continues, and even how the story ends.

CC: I think that part is actually one of my favorites in all of your apps, where Little Red Riding Hood gets to choose which way she goes, and it actually affects the end of the book. I think that’s brilliant.

…

CC: Can you tell us a little bit about the artwork in the Nosy Crow apps? I know I’ve been focusing a lot on your fairy tale apps here, but they all have a very consistent style. Can you tell us a little bit about them?

KW: The fairy tale apps are drawn by Ed Bryan, who’s a brilliant illustrator with a background in game illustration. What I think is very reassuring for people who think that apps are kind of scary and cold and conclusory is that Ed starts with pencil sketches every time. He’s all about creating characters in the way that illustrators have created characters forever. He starts off with pencil sketches in a little sketchbook, and then he gets those onto the screen, and then he starts coloring them up on screen…

[After creating the individual characters] he creates the background images. Every single piece of foliage, every bush that he draws, every tree—he does all of those leaves on those trees individually. Then he puts those illustrations into a program called Maya, which helps him to construct a 3D tree. So if you tilt your iPad when you’re looking at our apps, you get a sense of their 3D quality. It’s a very long, complex process but I think it provides a very picture book-y feel, like in the Fairy Tale Play Theatre app, because I think his illustrations have a lot of love in them. A lot of illustrated love.

CC: I definitely get that feel from them and I think that concept of making them 3D makes them even richer. It’s like being able to look at a picture book, but look deeper into it in a really special way. Do you have a different artist for the Bizzy Bear apps, or the Pip and Posy apps?

KW: Yes, the Bizzy Bear apps are created by the same person who creates the Bizzy Bear books, Benji Davies. So in that case, we have the book art and then we break it up. In the case of Bizzy Bear, we take the best full-frontal version of Bizzy Bear that we can have, where he’s standing looking at the reader, and we have to break him up and then almost animate him, like a puppet. Does that make sense?

Benji, who creates all the Bizzy Bear artwork, works digitally. So that’s a relatively easy thing to do. We can almost peel Bizzy Bear off the background because Benji, when he created Bizzy Bear, will have drawn the background and then he’d sort of placed Bizzy Bear digitally onto it. So then there’s something behind Bizzy Bear, there’s art behind Bizzy Bear.

By contrast, in Pip and Posy, there’s nothing behind Pip and there’s nothing behind Posy because Axel Scheffler, the illustrator behind Pip and Posy, he works in watercolor. So then it’s a much more complicated, difficult process to do any animation for Axel’s illustrations, which is quite a limitation in terms of what we can do with his art on screen [CC: Because his art doesn’t start digitally.] Right, because his art doesn’t start out digitally.

CC: Is there an average length of time it takes to develop an app from idea to available?

KW: We’ve discovered over time, with the size of the team that we have, that something as complicated as a fairy tale app takes about nine months from start to finish.

…

CC: One of the really important concepts that librarians and researchers are trying to share with parents when it comes to sharing apps with their kids is something that we call joint media engagement, which is really just a fancy way of saying play together with your kids as they’re playing with apps. Does the Nosy Crow team keep this concept in mind at all as they’re developing new apps? Have you heard of this concept? What are some of the ways that your apps do encourage people to play together?

KW: Yeah, we see a lot of parents reading the story with their child and then working through the app with the child. We know that happens, but I have to say that one of the things that we were interested in was actually giving children a kind of autonomy. Because I was struck by the fact that when my children were little, before they could decode text, they were very reliant on an adult being around, or knowing the text. They could work within known text very well, and then they’d be able to tell themselves the story.

I was quite excited about the idea that some reading time could be independent of an adult. Of course we also know that some parents will just sort of give their screen to their child, and the child is engaging with the app on their own. I feel comfortable that the quality of the app that we’re producing means that can still be screen time well spent, if you like.

With all of our apps, we have the option to have it read to you or to read it myself. And again that’s a mode that would encourage a parent and a child to interact with the app. We’re not expecting that parents would use one mode exclusively or the other mode exclusively. We think a lot of parents are trying it out, changing between familiarizing the child with the app by providing an audio version of it, listening to the audio version, and then they’ll explore and they’ll retell the story themselves. I think that’s a factor.

And we’ve also included gentle tools to encourage children to read it themselves as much as we can. We’ve done highlighted text in the audio version, so that you can see the words come up. And in the case of the read-it-by-myself version, you can choose different lengths of time for which the text appears. So you can choose a short length of time, a medium length of time, or a long length of time. So again, encouraging children to approach this in as many different ways as possible.

I think the app we’ve made that most clearly encourages sharing and engagement is the Fairy Tale Theater, where we really are encouraging children to make films of theater puppet shows that they are doing and then exporting those puppet shows. And we think that’s very exciting.

Handing back that creative charge is one thing I think that’s really thrilling. And enabling kids to capture that and then send it to whoever they want to is terrific. We’re very aware though of being responsible as app creators. One of the things that we wanted, one of the things that interests me about apps, was this potential for online play and the degree to which an app is a kind of walled garden.

We want to be quite careful about how many links to the “outside” any given app has. We’re very careful about introducing things that either pull the world in, or push the child out of the app [like social media sharing] and outside of the walled garden. I think there’s something very safe about the rules of the app if you like.

…

KW: One of the things I think has been surprising to us, just as a little footnote, are two things librarians have said to us here in the UK. One is how much they’re using the apps for children with special education needs. We have some fantastic stuff on it, a really beautiful piece written by the mother of a child called Ines on our web site. Ines adores our fairy tale apps, and they’ve been an immense part of her education and understanding a story, and Ines is a child who has down syndrome. We can’t begin to pretend that we created the app for children who have special educational needs, but I’m very interested that the apps have been particularly useful to a community of parents and carers and teachers and librarians who are supporting children with special education needs. So I think that’s fascinating.

The other thing that librarians have talked about has been the audio, and how useful the apps are for people for whom English is not the home language. [We’ve heard that] parents feel very comfortable and supported sharing these stories with their children because they have audio language support.

CC: That is absolutely one of the benefits of having these books with the narration available. But I do appreciate that you have both read-to-me and read-it-myself options. If there’s an app that only has the narrator reading it and doesn’t even have an option to turn that off, that’s almost a deal breaker for me. So I really appreciate that you guys have included that as an option—because it’s true that the apps will be used in different ways and it’s nice to be able to choose which way you’re going to use it.

 

 

Sonia Livingstone was recently asked to write the foreword for Children and Families in the Digital Age: Learning Together in a Media Saturated Culture edited by Elisabeth Gee, Lori M. Takeuchi, and Ellen Wartella. Here’s what she had to say.

Where shall we start, and where shall we focus our gaze, when making sense of the influx of digital devices that fill our homes and workplace, absorbing the attention of both children and parents, promising so much yet often proving frustrating, disappointing, worrying. It is tempting to start with the technologies themselves, for they highlight clear differences between how things used to be, including in our own childhoods, and how they are now. But as social scientists and historians know well, recent decades have seen many changes, among which digital media are among the most salient but are not, in any simple terms, the most influential.

The contributors to this book carefully demonstrate through painstaking empirical work that to understand modern families we must start by situating them at the intersection of the global movements of people and cultures, growing insecurity and risk in financial and employment futures, internal contestation over gender, authority, and social norms and, yes, also, transformed means of communication, information, entertainment and relationships within and beyond the home. Then, rather than focusing our analytic gaze on either the technology or the child, we should examine their mutual dynamics, along with the emerging interactions among parents, teachers, siblings, and friends with and around digital media. For all of these are changing in complex ways. But do they bring new opportunities to learn? And do the less well-off, including the growing segment of Hispanic-Latino families in the US, benefit in practice?

These are important questions, given the huge investment—national, community, and individual—in all kinds of digital devices, networks, and contents and, even more expensive, the training, expertise, and reshaping of societal infrastructures to accommodate and harness them supposedly for public good. While other books explore the associated transformations in the public, private, and third sectors, this one undertakes perhaps the most difficult task: working in depth with over 200 families to understand how they are finding ways to engage with the media in their domestic lives.

Building on prior insights that stress the value and potential of social and digital connections (youth-led, interest-driven, peer-supported), the authors variously demonstrate ways in which digital media afford new sites for learning individually and together, at home and, especially, between home and school. They thereby qualify and contest the multiplicity of myths that about in academic, policy, and public discourses about digital media—that children know it all already (as so-called “digital natives”), that parents know nothing about it (as so-called “digital immigrants”), that time with media is time wasted, that families are being broken apart by the multiplicity of personal screens, that the risks of digital media vastly outweigh the opportunities, and more.

But this does not mean all is plain sailing in the lives of modern families in the digital age. The fieldwork presented here, among many other findings, tells tales of school-provided laptops increasing the home-school disconnect for some low-income parents, of teachers underestimating how parents may use digital technologies to both support and complement learning in school, and of parents hampered by the belief that media may support entertainment or learning but not both. Yet in the best instances, problems such as these have become familiar to the expert community of scholar, policy makers, and practitioners that shape families’ future prospects. And while this does not, in and of itself, mean that the problems are being swept away, it does provide the basis for learning within that community. For while we rightly love to share best practice in digital media learning, it is often from past mistakes that we can learn the most.

Here we find some of the most creative suggestions emerging from the experiences of today’s families. To recognize how children develop expertise in searching, evaluating, and communicating knowledge as they act as online information brokers for their families. To relish the playful engagement of a father mixing media sources to support his little son’s fascination with space exploration. To notice that it is around co-viewing of the supposedly trashy telenovela that mother and teenage daughter get to have those sensitive conversations that it’s otherwise hard to begin.

My hope is that this book can help bring such instances to wider public attention, countering talk of harmful media, passive kids, and clueless parents. Also important, of course, would be a digital media industry that worked with parents, teachers, and kids to scaffold such positive experiences for greater benefit. Families need a media that represents the diversity of their audiences, that encourages imaginative play and shared learning among family members and that minimizes oppressive, stereotyped and over-commercialized contents. So let’s hope the industry reads this book too.

 

Sonia Livingstone is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She leads the project Preparing for a Digital Future, which follows the recently completed project The Class, both part of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Connected Learning Research Network. Among other prior work, she directed the 33-country network, EU Kids Online, funded by the EC’s Better Internet for Kids program, with impacts in the UK and Europe. She is the author or editor of 19 books and many academic articles and chapters.