Photo via Sesame Workshop

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center mourns the passing of Peter G. Peterson, an extraordinary international business and civic leader who was a founder and long-time supporter of the Center. Pete and his wife Joan Ganz Cooney have left an indelible imprint on the world through their contributions. He will be greatly missed.

Our thoughts and prayers are with Joan and her family during this time. Learn more about Pete’s legacy in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Photo: Rahul Banerjee

Imagine a room full of families gathered together around laptops. They’re making animations and games using computer programming. Many of the children or their parents are pointing at or touching the screens as they discuss storylines and game mechanics. As is often the case with technology, the children appear to be taking the lead, guiding their parents. The young experts sometimes maneuver their parent’s hand on the mouse, showing them where to click or what to drag-and-drop on the screen.

However, this is no ordinary family-oriented coding workshop—the parents in these families are English Language Learning (ELL) adults. In other words, they have limited fluency with English. In fact, some of these adults do not understand English at all. In this room full of ELL families, people are all speaking different languages at the same time, like Afar, Somali, Amharic, Arabic, French, English, and Swahili. How does one teach introductory programming to such a diverse group of participants?

Research has shown that children’s academic endeavors benefit from parental support—whether it’s math homework, or computer programming. A survey in 2015 revealed that most Americans “view computer science as a basic skill”. Even if most children don’t end up coding for a living in their adult life, a basic understanding of computer programming (we will use the terms “programming” and “coding” interchangeably) will empower them to intelligently navigate our future world and make discerning choices in their daily lives.

Photo: Rahul Banerjee

Unfortunately, parents who aren’t “tech savvy” can find it difficult to locate resources for their children who are interested in learning to code. Such barriers are only compounded for immigrant families, where parents are commonly ELL. One bright spot for such folks are family-oriented computer programming workshops, like Ricarose Roque’s Family Creative Learning. FCL activities are structured so as to be accessible to novices of all ages. These workshops can work well for ELL families, as long as all families speak the same language. The reality is that community centers usually serve people from a geographic region. For instance, 49 different languages are represented in Seattle’s Rainier Valley. To require multiple instructors (or instructors who speak multiple non-English languages) would make such family-oriented programs infeasible to operate.

We decided to try a radically different approach. In ELL families, children are usually fluent in English (unlike their parents), and also fluent in their mother tongue (like their parents). We had already worked on a programming environment which used minimal amounts of text (in English). We decided to eliminate all text from this interface, then teach children how to use it (using English). This is quite the opposite of many programming environments, where the code is generally in English. Our plan was to have children teach their parents how to use the system, using their own shared language.

We partnered with three different community centers serving immigrant populations, and set up “family night” sessions, where ELL families could learn to code together. We provided childcare in an adjacent room for children ages 6 and below, allowing families with younger children to participate.

The programming environment we built for these sessions is called BlockStudio. Jointly created by the Center for Game Science and the Information School at the University of Washington in Seattle, BlockStudio aims to make introductory programming more inclusive. The interaction model and user interface were refined through co-designing with KidsTeam UW.

BlockStudio employs two design principles: 1) Eliminate Text and 2) Avoid Abstraction.

Eliminate Text: As discussed before, text in a coding environment can pose barriers for ELL families. In theory, one could translate every word in an interface into a different language. Doing this manually is pretty tedious for even a single language, while machine translation is currently not quite there yet. But there’s yet another issue in our “family night” scenario. Even if we had a magical way to quickly and accurately translate English code into multiple languages, how would one teach programming to ELL families who are speaking different languages together? In essence, we needed to create a whole new way of coding, one that did not rely on any given language. Thus, removing text and replacing it with a completely visual programming language is one way to overcome this barrier.

Avoid Abstraction: Abstraction basically means “take this complicated sequence of operations, and think of them as a single operation, to keep things simple”. For instance, when we click “Send” on an email, our mail program (whether it’s Gmail  or Outlook), calls a function. That function itself is built as a sequence of operations, many of which are other functions (and so on), to send our email on its way. Operations performed by our “send email” function might include: checking that there is a valid email address in the “To” field, encoding attached files in a format that can be sent via email, etc. Functions let programmers write concise, intelligible, and easy-to-maintain code. However, a novice programmer does not start their journey by writing functions.

As an analogy, it is helpful to consider how the concept of a variable (x) is a foundational part of algebra and higher mathematics, yet nobody would suggest that students new to mathematics start with variables. We realized that for the children to explain to (and teach) their parents, our coding environment had to present a straightforward mental model of “how things work”. Adding abstraction to this scenario would impose a two-fold burden onto children. First, they would have to learn these concepts (what is a function?), and then convey these concepts to their parents (what is the Amharic word conveying the programmer’s notion of a “function”?). We decided that the best strategy was to avoid abstract concepts, and restrict this introductory programming experience to concrete notions, using colored shapes that can move, resize, collide, as well as appear and disappear.

BlockStudio embodies these two design principles. This video explains its interface.

A sample of games created by families in our “family night” sessions:

Maze: the objective is to move the face to get the stars. Eat the dots: the objective is to move the triangle to eat green dots, but avoid the star. Flappy bird clone: a simplified “Flappy Bird”, where one must avoid the green pipes.

We observed several interesting outcomes during these sessions. All participating families showed evidence of Joint Media Engagement, using the computer as a way to collaboratively discuss and implement their ideas. We saw physical displays of positive feelings (cheers, hugging, high fives, etc.) among family members, especially after successfully creating a game mechanic. Some creations were more complicated than others, using game mechanics that required multiple different pieces of logic. For instance, rules to move a character, working in tandem with rules for collisions, resulting in a “solve the maze while avoiding the traps” game. All families authored code with some interactive behavior.

These findings are important, because they show that we can bypass text when teaching introductory programming, thereby including populations that face challenges with English literacy (and text in general). As a broader goal, research into programming within underrepresented communities needs to consider such literacy barriers, and how their removal can help make programming a more inclusive activity.

Our work with ELL families will be presented at the ACM SIGGCHI Conference in Montreal (April 21-26) this year. A pre-print version of our paper can be accessed here.

To try out the BlockStudio system yourself, please visit its official home on the Internet: blockstud.io. You’ll need to sign up, but it’s free for everyone to use.

Rahul Banerjee is a Ph.D student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is exploring ways to make computer programming and its related tasks more inclusive.

In this second installment of the Podcasts for Families series, I was thrilled to be able to interview the enthusiastic Mindy Thomas, co-host of Wow in the World, a show featuring cool science and technology. If you haven’t listened to their show yet, this interview will give you a pretty good sense of what to expect!

Although there’s not a totally contiguous storyline in this show, the big personalities of hosts Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz—along with regular characters like Reggie the carrier pigeon and Grandma G-Force—are enough to capture the interest of both of my children.  Each episode is packed with goofy, laugh-out-loud moments interwoven seamlessly with fascinating scientific news from around the world.

Guy Raz and Mindy Thomas

Where do you make your recordings?
We record in my little home studio, which is actually located in the corner of my basement guestroom. Last fall, it got a quick mention in a New York Times article about podcasts for kids, so now I tell all of our guests that they’re staying in a world famous landmark when they visit. Nobody seems to care. They still hang their wet towels on the microphone stands!

Do you write all of your own material?  How much, if any, is improv that happens while you’re recording?
For the first season, we did 31 episodes, and the writing was split equally between Guy and myself. For the second season, we brought in an awesome third writer named Tom van Kalken. He’s from Australia, lives in Vancouver, Canada, and we’ve actually never even met in person! Now we split the writing three ways, and go over scripts together, making edits and punching up jokes (my favorite part). After Guy and I record, I edit the recording, and have fun getting creative with adding audio bits in post production. I have tons of funny, wild, off the cuff lines from Guy that I put together with my own lines like puzzle pieces. I’ve created entire scenes that never actually happened that way@

Mindy Thomas, co-host of Wow in the World

Where do you discover the “wow’s” you talk about on your show?  Do you have a team of people reading research journals?
We [the writers] are the team! We’re constantly scouring science journals and science news sites for interesting new research to feature on the show. There’s so much fascinating stuff out there, and so much of it never even makes its way into the mainstream. As a kid, I believed that science was boring and not for me. I’m so grateful for this second chance to discover how truly WOW science can be! I know that there are kids out there who think about it the way I did, and when we’re creating the episodes, I always have them in mind.

About how long does it take you to make one episode all the way through, from finding the idea, writing a script, to recording, editing and publishing? 
Roughly speaking, it takes about a week to create an episode from start to finish, though we’re always working on multiple episodes at a time. Last summer I did the math on how long it takes me to edit the recording of one episode, and it came out to an HOUR for every FIVE minutes! For our incredible sound designer Jed, it takes about an hour to create a MINUTE of the magic! It might sound like a long time, but it’s really a lot of fun to create each episode.

Do you have a favorite episode?
Oh man, I have so many moments of different episodes that I really love, but I have a particular soft spot for the Let’s Flamingle episode. It was a script that I wrote, and on the day we were set to record, Guy and I were sitting at my kitchen table doing a read through and he was all “Ohhhh no, I’m NOT dressing up like a flamingo.” (Or something like that.) Now keep in mind that before Wow in the World, he had an entire career, doing everything from covering war in the Middle East to hosting Weekend All Things Considered, not to mention the other two shows he currently hosts, The TED Radio Hour and How I Built This. In short, he’s a very respected and esteemed journalist! Which is exactly why I thought it would be funny to gently trick him into a flamingo costume, and put him in a flamingo pen at the zoo!  But he was not having it. We had a friendly argument, and then agreed to revisit the episode at a later time. In the end, we reached a compromise, and he reluctantly put on the [imaginary] flamingo costume. I think he’s glad he did, though he may never actually admit it to me. Since then, he’s stepped out of his comfort zone so many times for the show, and written some of the funniest jokes and scenes. I’m so grateful to have him as my partner on this wild and sometimes ridiculous adventure.

Questions from my 7 year old:

Why did you name your bird Reggie? 
You know, I’d like to know the same thing! I wish I had a better story for this, but honestly, it was just a name that popped into my head while sitting on my front porch typing out the first Reggie scene. He was never meant to be a permanent fixture on the show, but I’m so glad he decided to stick around.

Why did you name your show Wow in the World?
We knew we were creating a show about amazing new scientific discoveries, and we wanted to use those stories to better connect kids like you to the truly amazing wonders of the world around them, with stories that make you say WOW! That’s the short answer. The long answer includes hundreds of other names that didn’t make the cut.

Question from my 3 year old:

Why do kids have poopy?
That’s a really good question! And one I think about a lot. So poop or “poopy” is really just our body’s way of getting rid of all the junk and toxic stuff it doesn’t need after we eat and digest our food. If we didn’t poop, the inside of our bodies would probably look like a house full of stinky garbage. Sometimes when I’m cleaning out a messy closet, I wish that closets could poop too. It would make the whole process a lot more efficient, and I wouldn’t have to think too much about what to keep or what to toss. I should also point out that kids aren’t the only ones who ‘have poopy.’ Teachers, librarians, and even your favorite podcast hosts have poopy too! (Just try not to think too much about that last one.)

Carissa Christner works as a Youth Services Librarian in Madison, Wisconsin which she likes much better than her first job in high school, working at a theme park. She and her two young children love to test out new apps together, read books and go for walks in the woods. She blogs about her library adventures at librarymakers.blogspot.com. Check out the App Fairy website and follow along on Twitter at @appfairy.

The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as “Empathy Machines” by Matthew Farber and Karen Schrier

How do we live together in a connected world? How do we cultivate “global citizens” who can relate to others—across international borders and Internet forums, or political aisles and bus aisles?

These are increasingly pressing questions, and ones that are considered by two recent publications:

• The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Digital Play for Global Citizens, by Dr. Jordan Shapiro
• UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP)’s “The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as ‘Empathy Machines,’” by Dr. Matthew Farber and Dr. Karen Schrier

One essential skill for navigating our connected world is how we communicate with others. Both papers emphasize the need to foster empathy and other socio-emotional (SEL) skills, such as perspective-taking and negotiating differences. These skills help us connect with people and foster mutual understanding because they enable us to listen to others’ point of view, even if we do not agree with them.

How can play support this? It may be surprising that play can help people learn and connect, but it is supported by research, such as by Dr. Mimi Ito and the Connected Learning Research Network; my own works Knowledge Games and Learning, Education & Games; Matthew Farber’s latest book, Game-Based Learning in Action; and earlier works by Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Seymour Papert. Recently, Dr. Sinem Siyahhan and Dr. Elisabeth Gee came out with a book, Families at Play, as part of the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, which delves into how games support family connectedness.

Shapiro’s Digital Play for Global Citizens notes a number of playful platforms that can help kids connect with their peers around the world and cultivate understanding for each others’ customs. For instance, Empatico.org connects kids in different classrooms, allowing real-time collaboration on specific activities. In the activity, “Helping Hands,” kids discuss how they help their communities, and in “Ways We Play,” kids compare how they play.

One reason cultural awareness activities may help foster empathy is because it enhances our openness to others’ perspectives. As we write about in our white paper, perspective-taking is the “act of taking on another’s views such that we can better understand them.” In Paul Darvasi’s UNESCO white paper on empathy, he explains that, “Part of the process of perspective-taking involves openness—we need to first value other perspectives such that we can embrace them and consider them more fully.” In other words, we need to care about and value others’ perspectives to be able to empathize with them.

An example of nonverbal communication during a game of Way.

There is also something about taking a journey together—even if it is a virtual journey—that helps people understand, care about, and connect with each other. Both papers mention Way, a unique and imaginative game made by CoCo & Co., developers who (at the time) were students at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) program. Way is a two-person game, where both players (who are anonymous strangers) play together using only nonverbal communication. The players are separated by a split screen and must work together to overcome obstacles that they can only do with the help of the other person. At the very end, once the players win the 20-minute game together, they are finally in the same screen and can write messages to each other atop a map of the world.

When investigating Way, I discovered that the two initially anonymous players would often become “friends” by the end of the game. They would scrawl “hi” and “hello friend” on the map and start conversations. They would circle where they were from—often across the globe—and share their perspectives. Perhaps there is something about play that helps us form friendships and empathize with another—and there’s something about empathy that helps us form friendships through play.

In a new, as yet unpublished study on Way, I observed 30 participants playing the game with an unidentified, anonymous partner (who, in this particular study, was always the same researcher). I found that all of the participants rated their game partner high on trustworthiness, and all but one rated the partner high on helpfulness and cooperativeness. About two-thirds of the study participants felt that they had already started developing a friendship with their partner, even though they had only spent 20 minutes playing with them online in a digital world.

Similarly, in my study of Fable III, participants considered even a virtual character their “friend” after playing the game with them for many hours. All but one of the twenty participants I observed playing Fable III chose not to sacrifice their mentor “Walter,” a virtual character in the game, despite the game forcing the player to leave him behind.

So here’s to digital play helping us form friendships and care about others—across our world, and even across virtual worlds, too!

Dr. Karen Schrier is Associate Professor and Director of the Games & Emerging Media program at Marist College. Prior to Marist College, she spent over a decade producing websites, apps, and games at places like Scholastic, Nickelodeon, and BrainPOP. She is the editor of the book series, Learning, Education & Games, published by ETC Press (Carnegie Mellon), and co-editor of two books on games and ethics. Her latest book, Knowledge Games: How Playing Games Can Help Solve Problems, Create Insight, and Make Change, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and has been covered by Forbes, New Scientist, and Times Higher Education. She holds a doctorate from Columbia University, master’s degree from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree from Amherst College.

This post was originally published on EdCentral.

Download Lost Connections in a World of Connectivity (PDF)

Even in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of online innovation, families with young children are experiencing a digital divide. Hispanic families in particular saying that they experience slower connections, more data limits, and more broken computers and devices than their white and Asian-Pacific Islander counterparts. More than 80 percent of educators in the area’s high-need schools say that they are not assigning homework that uses digital media because they worry that families do not have access at home.

And mixed feelings about the benefits and harm of technology and digital media permeate the community.

Those are among the findings of a new report, Lost Connections in a World of Connectivity, from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s Center for Early Learning, with research support from New America and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. The intent was to gather information that would help address questions of technology use, attitudes, and access among families with young children and educators in pre-K through third grade across the three counties of San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara.

Calling the topic a “natural fit for Silicon Valley,” the report suggests that community members and innovators should “lead the way in ensuring that digital media and technology designed for young children considers optimal child development and promotes, rather than hinders, equity in school readiness and learning.”

The report is the first in the country to look at young children’s technology use comprehensively at the local level, probing different parts of the early learning ecosystem within the same one-year time frame. It includes results from an online survey of 907 parents and 617 teachers and child care workers, focus groups with public librarians, and two “community conversations”—meetings hosted by the center to elicit comments and questions from parents and other family members. The survey cut across the early childhood age span, from birth through age 8, capturing information on how parents and teachers view technology in child care settings, pre-K and other early learning settings, and the early grades of elementary school.

To ensure that the study included families from a range of economic, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, survey respondents from the three counties were drawn from a national opt-in research panel that is designed to ensure representation of different socio-economic groups. The survey was conducted in Spanish and English.

Some highlights from the report that reflect problems with equitable access:

• The top problem named by educators and parents was that the internet was “too slow,” but more educators (47 percent) than parents (36 percent) agreed with that statement. “Software problems” was the second most frequently chosen problem by educators, while “too many people sharing a device” was the second most frequently chosen problem by parents. Broken devices were third on the list for both parents and teachers.
• Hispanic families reported experiencing more problems than non-Hispanic white or Asian-Pacific Islander families. For example, 46 percent of Hispanic families said the Internet was “too slow” and 41 percent had at some point hit the data limit on their wireless service, compared to 32 percent and 25 percent of non-Hispanic whites.
• Eighty-one percent of educators in schools with a majority of children qualifying for free or reduced-price meals reported that they have not assigned homework that requires technology or digital media because they thought that the kids would not have a way to access the materials at home.
• Between one-third and one-half of parents (depending on county) say that “home tech challenges” make it difficult for their children to keep up with their peers at school.

“I have watched kids in the library type full papers on smartphones,” said one of the participants in the community conversations. “With the increase in rent, more people I know, including me, have to cut off our Internet,” said another.

The report also brings to the surface some of the unease that parents feel when it comes to technology use, as well as the divide between educators of very young children and those who work in the K-3 grades. The results from the survey show a level of nuance and mixed feelings across parents and educators, some of which are in conflict with each other. It finds:

• Educators serving low-income children (compared to those serving higher-income children) were more likely to agree with the statement “Children should be exposed to technology from a young age so they grow up learning to use it and feel comfortable with it.”
• However, among parents, lower income and Hispanic parents were most likely to believe strongly that children should not be exposed to technology at a young age so that they can develop important skills first.
• Educators of children in Transitional Kindergarten up through third grade were more likely to support the idea of exposing children to technology from a young age than were educators of younger children.
• Parents in general—and with no significant differences across socioeconomic groups—said they believed that “educational media” could be beneficial for their children across multiple subject areas (language, reading, and writing; math; science, art; social studies; social emotional skills; and creativity).

One of the participants in the community conversations said: “I’m really concerned about how technology affects other skills. I see my friend’s kid who can use the tablet better than his mom at age 4 but still cannot hold a pencil.”

The report used focus group conversations with public librarians to gain a sense of how children’s librarians and other library professionals see themselves in the Silicon Valley ecosystem. “Librarians uniformly agreed that the most important role they can play is to help parents navigate the use of technology with their child,” the report says. “However, nearly all of the librarians state that they are not currently prepared to adequately step into that role.” It adds that intentional communication between the area’s public libraries and local elementary schools “is rare, let alone specific to early learning technology.”

Twelve recommendations to solve these problems are laid out at the end of the report, including a push for librarians to be part of state advisory councils and considered key stakeholders in determining recommendations for children’s use of technology. It also promotes the importance of professional learning for educators across the age spectrum so that they can use technology in developmentally appropriate ways and engage parents in conversations about what is best for their children at home.

Fixing these disconnects and other equity issues raised by the Silicon Valley report is among the aims of a broader project underway at New America and the Cooney Center about the role of technology in early learning and family engagement. Last spring we published How to Bring Early Learning and Family Engagement into the Digital Age: A Guide for City and Community Leaders, which suggests four action steps communities should take before jumping into technology purchases or implementing new family engagement plans. The first was to take stock of family engagement offerings and online connectivity with an eye toward equity and diversity.  The results from this three-county research project are a good example of how communities can take a comprehensive look at what is happening around them and open up new conversations about what parents and educators need.

For more, listen to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation podcast released last week in which Lisa Guernsey talks about the local survey results and national trends with Michelle Siosan-Hyman, senior officer for the foundation’s Center for Early Learning. 

Lisa Guernsey is deputy director of the Education Policy program and director of the Learning Technologies project at New America.

Early this morning, I spoke to a friend in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through my webcam, the Skype video was still a little choppy, but clear enough to recognize that we were each settled into different parts our daily routines (the time difference is six hours). I took sips from a big mug of coffee, the orange-yellow sunrise glaring in through the window to the right of my desk. For my friend, it was midday and he was nibbling on pita. Not the flat-bread that my kids and I like to dip into hummus, but a savory pastry pie that’s often called burek.

Download Digital Play for Global Citizens

Today’s connection was so fast that it almost felt like we were in the same room. But in some ways, that made the experience even more strange. I was speaking in a soft whisper, trying not to wake my kids and conforming to the quiet stillness of the day’s pre-dawn hours. He was wide awake and energetic—Sarajevo’s light snow and freezing rain pattering against his windowsill. A few times, he called out to the person in the next room because, presumably, everyone there was already awake.

Digital networks bring us together technologically. Screen-to-screen can absolutely approximate the experience of a face-to-face conversation. But sending encoded signals back and forth across the planet is not identical to being in the same place. The Internet facilitates quick and efficient communication, but the affective stimuli, which shape our moods and dispositions, can often be disjointed and dissonant.

Zoom out from my personal experience and imagine all the qualitatively discordant connections which now expose people in faraway places—satellite signals, fiber-optic cables, television, and radio waves broadcast our differences to every corner of the globe. And things can become so quickly entangled that it’s easy to imagine that the World Wide Web was spun by an apathetic spider. We have all metamorphosed into global citizens of a connected world. But we’ve yet to unravel all the potential intellectual, social, affective, and emotional knots. So how will we prepare our kids?

Image from OECD

To live and thrive in this new world—to confront and adapt to its unique frictions and challenges—today’s kids will need to develop a capacity for connected thinking and macro-mindedness. Distinct cognitive and social-emotional skills are the prerequisite for understanding rapidly changing geo-political climates, making sense of a globalized economy, and contributing to a worldwide community. So much so that the OECD recently developed a new two-part PISA assessment to evaluate “Global Competence.”

Their framework has four dimensions (see image, right):

• Examine local, global, and intercultural issues. “The ability to combine knowledge about the world with critical reasoning whenever people form their own opinions about a global issue.”
• Understand and appreciate the perspectives and world views of others. “A willingness and capacity to consider global problems from multiple viewpoints.”
• Engage in open, appropriate, and effective interactions across cultures. “Engage in respectful dialogue, want to understand the other, and try to include marginalized groups.”
• Take action for collective well-being and sustainable development. “Individuals’ readiness to respond to a given local, global, or intercultural issue or situation.”

I was happy to discover that these four dimensions were very similar to the competencies I had in mind when writing Digital Play for Global Citizens, a new guide from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and Asia Society’s Center for Global Education.

For a few years now, I’ve been visiting, consulting, and speaking with schools all over the world. And I often find myself wondering if current educational objectives are adequately anchored to a set of collective values. As a global community, we desperately need to figure out ways to be tolerant of diversity, respectful of difference, but also alike enough to manage constant connection. We need to find ways to mediate the tension between preserving heterogenous cultures and adopting homogenous protocols.

That’s why I wrote this guide. I wanted to help grownups prepare kids for a world that’s governed by new technological, economic, and geopolitical paradigms. I wanted to introduce educators, youth development leaders, and parents to innovative tools which can help kids learn about, understand, and engage with our connected world. All the academic knowledge and vocational skills are useless if they can’t be leveraged by collaborative, caring, compassionate, creative, and confident global citizens.

But why a guide to digital play? Because digital play is the most appropriate way to teach these lessons. While today’s children are playing online, they are also learning to be comfortable with a specific technological worldview. They’re developing the confidence to easily operate and experiment with networked tools. They are applying higher order thinking skills within virtual environments. They are also becoming acclimated to subtle social cues and nuanced behaviors. They’re procuring habits-of-mind for a connected world.

The fields of child development and education are about how young people learn to make use of language, knowledge, and academic content within the context of lived experience. Although we often think of “context” as if it were some sort of abstract cultural or historical zeitgeist, the reality is much simpler. For humans, context is all about how we use specific sets of tools to intellectually, emotionally, economically, and materially fabricate our world. Digital tools are the new context.

From exploring boundaries, borders, and geography; to developing empathy and understanding of diversity; to fostering a sense of curiosity and wonder about nature; this guide introduces practical, ready-to-use resources and techniques for using digital play to promote global citizenship.

I’m so excited to end this first season of the App Fairy podcast with an interview featuring children’s app giant, Toca Boca. I have loved their creations since my very first exploration into the world of children’s apps. With quirky illustrations, open-ended play, sense of humor, and deeply thoughtful respect for children’s play, Toca Boca is probably one of the most well-known app makers for kids.

For this episode, I had the opportunity to speak with both Caroline Ingeborn, the current president and COO, and with Petter Karlsson, one of Toca Boca’s Play Designers. Listen to the episode to find out how they weave the Toca Boca philosophy throughout their entire process to create apps that kids truly want to play.

After listening to the episode, be sure to visit the App Fairy website to see photos of Caroline and Petter and their fun working environment. You’ll also find free Toca Boca printables! Finally, please also take a moment to complete the brief App Fairy survey to help us evaluate possibilities for future seasons of the podcast.

Carissa Christner works as a Youth Services Librarian in Madison, Wisconsin which she likes much better than her first job in high school, working at a theme park. She and her two young children love to test out new apps together, read books and go for walks in the woods. She blogs about her library adventures at librarymakers.blogspot.com. Check out the App Fairy website and follow along on Twitter at @appfairy.