Innovation in meeting the needs of young children is not a new thing. Head Start and Sesame Street were both born out of the War on Poverty in the 1960s, and Mister Rogers Neighborhood celebrated its 50th year anniversary this year. Notable progress in developing new practice and policy models has been undertaken over the past few decades. Scalable, evidence-based models like Early Head Start, home visitation programs, Educare, and other system interventions such as professional learning standards, state-based pre-K, and quality rating systems—to name a few—are now broadly influencing early childhood opportunities for young children and their families.

Despite significant progress, there is much more work to be done to deliver on a vision where all children are flourishing toward education and life success. The United States still lags most OECD countries in its public investment in early childhood. A third of children in the United States today are not fully ready when they enter kindergarten; this number is even higher than 50% for children from a lower income background. Kindergarten readiness is generally defined as a combination of socio-emotional/executive function skills (e.g., children being able to communicate their needs, wants, and thoughts verbally, and to be enthusiastic and curious about approaching new activities) and cognitive/physical and health attributes (e.g., developing language and literacy skills, and basic math, social, and motor skills). A strong early start matters for lifelong learning and fulfillment. For instance, children who enter kindergarten unprepared are:

• 25% more likely to drop out of high school
• 40% more likely to become a teen parent
• 50% more likely to be placed in special education
• 60% more likely to never attend college
• 70% more likely to be arrested for violent crime

 Why Now?

Scientific progress in neuroscience has clearly established why the early years matter, and recent research is rapidly advancing our societal understanding of brain development and quality of human interactions, including responses to stress and trauma. New technologies and platforms are fueling progress in a fragmented early childhood ecosystem. Furthermore, we can now make a powerful economic case for investing in our youngest children: well-designed programs can yield demonstrable societal returns. For example, the Nobel Laureate economist Jim Heckman’s research documents that there is a 13 percent return on investment for comprehensive, high-quality, birth-to-five early education and that returns are the greatest in the earliest years.

In parallel, new demographics with two-third of children under five in homes where both parents work, are hyper-connected and informed, and a new “majority-minority” of young children with a majority of children under five being non-white are driving demand for innovative quality early childhood solutions.

In this context, how can we accelerate the supply of affordable quality solutions so that all children can enter school ready to learn? How can we help advance the skill sets critical for the future of work right from the start? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we spur early childhood development to build new social capital, leveraging the evidence that high quality early childhood development can help foster family, friend and neighborly relationships that are needed to build a brighter, shared future for all?

A First-Of-Its Kind Event: Early Futures

Omidyar Network, Sesame Workshop and Promise Venture Studio have joined forces with the Campaign for Grade Level Reading, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, the Early Learning Lab, Gary Community Investments, the LEGO Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Valhalla Charitable Foundation, to spark what we hope will be a larger movement for the country—and potentially the world—to focus on building on past and new innovations for our youngest children. We aspire to shine a bright light on promising entrepreneurial talent and innovations, and encourage  more leaders with innovative ideas to come forward.

Each of our organizations has been focused on early childhood—from investing, to building programs at scale, to new innovations—but we all recognize that additional collaboration and partnership will be critical for success in this next phase.  Together we can achieve a collective vision of impact for all young children.

Kicking off on November 27, 2018, Early Futures is a first-of-its-kind two-day gathering of leaders who have recognized that the early years are a critical time for new investments in our nation’s most precious resource, our children. A cross-section of 200 leaders from within and outside the field of early learning and development will convene to form partnerships, gain exposure to new ideas, and support a field that is percolating with exciting innovations and a new cadre of entrepreneurs.

Most importantly, this new community will examine opportunities to build new capacity in the early learning field as it enters a critical next stage. Attendees include some of the leading pioneers in early learning and healthy development whose track record of accomplishments have laid a solid foundation for sustained progress. Additionally, more than 50 non-profit and for-profit ventures in the inaugural class of Promise Venture Studio, a new non-profit venture studio attracting, supporting, and connecting entrepreneurs focused on early childhood development. The ventures were selected to demo their solutions from early to late stages of growth. They extend from platforms that encourage outdoor play or more quality in-home childcare, to services that support early identification of autism, treatment of opioid addiction or early language development, to programs that reach children and parents where they might need it most via tech solutions or in-person assistance. Foundations, impact investors, policy makers, educators, health care professionals, scholars, and media leaders make up the rest of this diverse and dynamic community.

Just like Head Start, Sesame Street, and Mister Rogers Neighborhood, the innovations we seed today will set forth a future where every child can fulfill his or her innate potential. We are excited about what the next decade of innovation will bring for our youngest learners. Let’s harness the power of science, innovation and design for scale, combined with access to all types of capital, to help pave the way for innovative early childhood solutions that positively impact a new generation of early learners. Let’s build the future of early childhood together.

 

 

Early Futures runs from November 27-28, 2018. Follow and join the conversation at #EarlyFutures.

This past November 7 and 8, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Center for Science and the Imagination and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, and Dubit convened about 60 field leaders at the inaugural Future of Childhood Salon on Immersive Media and Child Development. As salon participants, these leaders in education, research, pediatric medicine, technology policy, content creation, hardware development, and more began thinking about the opportunities and risks of immersive media (i.e., augmented, virtual, and mixed realities) for young children.

Participants shared their expertise through lightning talks on the current state of research and immersive media, experienced demos of real systems, and worked together in group activities in which they mapped out positive futures for young children regarding the use of these new technologies. At the end of the second day, they brainstormed next steps for hardware developers, content creators, researchers, caregivers, teachers, and community-based practitioners, advocacy and policy groups, and investors and philanthropists, and wrote reflective haikus (see a few samples below!).

We are in a unique point in time in which we are able to study, plan, envision, and think about children and their development before immersive media becomes ubiquitous in their lives. With actual systems that are widely and commercially available, we have the opportunity to study the effects of these technologies on children and to produce development standards and guidelines before the technologies are released more broadly to them. This Future of Childhood Salon was a first step in being more proactive, individually and collectively, about ensuring that children are positively influenced by immersive media.

In 2019, we will share a summary of the outcomes of this event that we hope will  continue the conversation. 

HAIKUS

The increasing pace of change
Call us all to act more quickly
So we don’t become lost!

Immerse yourself in
thoughtful, creative people
We can make a change

Virtual is real?
We asked the big question!
Much was revealed!

Kids in big headsets
Can’t see where they are going
How can we guide them?

Kiley Sobel is a Research Associate with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center; she just received her PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Kiley is interested in Interaction Design and Children, Child-Computer Interaction, and Assistive Technology. Her dissertation research was in understanding how interactive technology might help increase opportunities for children with and without disabilities to meaningfully and equitably participate in the same setting inclusively. She has done assistive technology research with Microsoft Research, worked as a teacher’s assistant in early childhood education classrooms, and worked as a behavioral therapist for children.

Claudia Haines, librarian at Homer Public Library in Homer, Alaska, describes a recent Storytime with Robots event that she hosted in which children and their parents had the opportunity to think about computational thinking along with early literacy. This post was originally published on Claudia’s blog, Never Shushed, and appears here with permission.

I’ve been reading and thinking A LOT about computational thinking (CT) and coding this winter as part of my work on the Libraries Ready to Code initiative. And by A LOT, I mean A LOT, A LOT. Needless to say, that thinking has not stayed put in my coding programs for older kids and teens, like  <HPLCode>, or in the Maker Club. It has spilled over into every aspect of my work at the library, including storytime.

Storytime has always been about supporting early literacy (EL) and learning. What is cool about computational thinking is that it aligns so nicely with so much of what we already do at the library, even in storytime. Every time I mention CT or coding in a storytime or a family program, a grown-up speaks up and makes the connection, on their own, between traditional literacy and code or computational thinking. “Making a program (by connecting blocks of code) is like building a sentence,” for example.

The Plan

Five minutes: Settling In
As families entered, I invited them to “get ready for storytime.” For regulars, this meant following a procedure they knew. For new families, I broke down the “get ready for storytime” into: take off your shoes if you want to (okay at our library because of the snow, mud, etc. that is outside), hang up your coat if you brought one, choose a storytime mat, and meet me at the reading area.

Five minutes: Getting Started
When we were gathered in the reading area, I asked kids “what is a robot?” Kids shouted out ideas and led us to talk about what robots do, who designs them and why. I then asked the group “what is the difference between you and a robot?” and “what is similar?”

I then showed the group my Code-a-Pillar and pointed out the parts of the robot (power button, lights, sensors, code blocks, wheels, etc.) I told them this was my turn to play with the robot, but they would all have a turn after we played and read together.

Ten minutes: Book #1, Pete the Cat, Robo-Pete by James Dean (Harper Collins, 2015)
As with any storytime reading, this was a conversation! We talked about patterns in the story and kids tried to anticipate what might happen next based on previous occurrences in the story. We also compared Robo-Pete to what we knew about robots.

About five minutes: Feltboard Robots
Next we built a robot as a group on the felt board. I cut enough similar pieces of felt into recognizable shapes to make two robots. I divided the felt board into three sections. If you have used Scratch or other block coding platform, you will recognize the similarity of the three sections (the stage, scripts area, and blocks palette). I built one robot beforehand and had the other identical pieces in the thin section of the board. They pieces were arranged by shape. As a group, we talked about the robot’s parts and what we thought each might be used for. We then started building the new robot out of the other parts. The idea here was to support shape knowledge, but also to practice the process of articulating making, doing, or building something. I asked where we should start (“At the bottom!” they yelled). I then asked kids to tell me the shape and color of the part they wanted me to add next, and I moved each of the the felt pieces over. We built the robot you see here. This activity also became a station for further exploration after the group time.

Ten minutes: If You’re A Robot And You Know It by David Carter (Cartwheel Books, 2015)
Before we read (and sang and danced) to this song—I mean, book—we talked about circuit boards, which are featured in the text. Kids quickly identified with this familiar song and jumped up to act it out. The text of the book repeats in a similar fashion to the song and kids move different robot parts in each each verse.

Ten minutes: Robot Zot by Jon Scieszka (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2009)
To finish off the reading portion of storytime we read a book that is just silly! Be ready to use your animated voices and be loud!

3 minutes: Clap Your Hands by They Might be Giants
Before we moved on to the station portion of storytime, we danced together. I told them there were three actions we would do in this song: clap hands, stomp feet, and jump in the air. I asked them “How do we know when do each action?” Kids answered with ideas like “until it stops!” I brought out the images of each action (5 hands clapping, 5 feet stomping, 4 jumping) to match the number of times the singer says each action and then counted as we danced and did the actions. I mentioned that the song is divided into beats or sections (measures) so that the musicians and dancers know when changes will happen.

Stations

Code-a-pillar play
Here kids programmed the Code-a-Pillar to move towards a target. Some kids spent time figuring out how it worked and understanding which arrow was left or right. Kids took turns coding and even collaborated on where the robot should go (“It’s looking for something to eat.”). Grown-ups guided play at times, talking about the sequence of events that need to happen first, etc. and about directionals.

 

Cube Stackers
Future Coders: Cube Stackers by Alex Toys is basically a board game that involves cubes with robot parts on the different sides. Kids build robots by twisting an turning the sides based on instructions not he game cards. It is primarily for kids 5+. In the summer I have several 5+ kids that come to storytime, and this has been a hit with them. Whole families took time to work through this thoughtful game.

Aluminum Can Robots
In this activity, kids built robots by adding magnetized parts to cleaned off cans. I encouraged grown-ups to talk with kids as they built, asking open-ended questions about the robot, what is could do, etc.
To prepare, I had collected and cleaned aluminum cans for the robot bodies. I hot glued small magnets to objects like big buttons, clothespins, pipe cleaners, etc. for robot parts. Parts were set out all mixed up in bins and the bodies were laid out separately to encourage kids to create their own kind of robot.

Robot Coloring Sheets
This activity was great for kids who like to color or needed a quieter activity between other stations.

Feltboard Robots
Younger children really loved this activity and enjoyed repeating what we had done as a group.

Robot Party app on the mounted iPad
Sago Mini’s Robot Party is a giggle-inducing group activity that involves building digital robots that dance and more. Perfect for groups of two or three because the app features multi-touch so kids (or kids and grown-ups) can work together.

How it Went

Families loved this storytime for the richness of the activities and the obvious learning. They appreciated the CT and EL asides and the play ideas they could replicate at home.

When I first got a Code-a-Pillar I had thought it would be kind of loud and garish for storytime, but not so. The sounds and lights are less intense in a group setting and the robot moves at just the right speed for young children learning to code for the first time.

 

Claudia Haines leads storytimes, hosts Maker programs, and gets great media into the hands of kids and teens as the Youth Services Librarian and Media Mentor at the Homer Public Library (Alaska). She is a co-author of the Association for Library Service to Children’s white paper, Media  Mentorship in Libraries Serving Youth (2015). She trains other librarians as media mentors and serves on both local and national committees that support families and literacy. She blogs at www.nevershushed.com. @claudiahaines

This guest post summarizes a research paper discussing how Latino children collaboratively search the internet with their adult family members to solve family needs. The research for this project began while Jason Yip was a Research Fellow at the Cooney Center in 2013-14, and has just been presented at the ACM Computer Supported Collaborative Work Conference on November 5th. Read the paper here.

Searching for online information is not equitable.

People search online to find recipes and to plan trips, but also to find answers to more important questions about health, education, and finances. A rich body of work has studied searching practices of monolingual English speakers for both children and adult. This body work has mainly focused on high income English speakers.

Lower-socioeconomic (SES) immigrant parents often rely on their children’s language skills to problem-solve family needs. Understanding this phenomenon is important because there are approximately 8 million U.S. children that have at least one English-language learner (ELL) immigrant parent. ELL immigrant parents, who are often navigating new social environments, rely on their children’s native English language skills and assistance to access online and offline information and resources related to critical contexts like health concerns, financial decisions, social service needs, and employment opportunities. A recent national survey of lower-income parents in the U.S. revealed that Latino immigrant parents with lower-SES status, limited English-language proficiency, and without a high school degree rely more on their children to use technology and make sense of information online compared to parents of other backgrounds. Thus, children in such families take on greater responsibilities that often follow them throughout adulthood.

In this blog we highlight the complex factors that impact collaborative online searching in bilingual families and second, how collaborative searching occurs in bilingual families.

Parents and children work collaboratively to address family needs using digital resources in a process we call Online Search and Brokering (OSB).

Despite previous work identifying that lower-SES families with ELL immigrant parents rely on their children to search for important information online, it is unknown: (1) how children use their language and digital literacy skills to search and make sense of information online, and (2) how children and parents work together together to find answers to questions that impact the family well-being. To answer these questions, we focused on lower-SES Latino families with ELL immigrant parents for three reasons.

First, Latinos are the fastest growing U.S. minority group. Second, they struggle to access information online. Third, they are an understudied community in our understanding of information search practices.

We observed Latino families searched for information online in their homes

One could argue that these questions could be answered by collecting search logs that describe the terms families use in their searches. But a quantitative description would not reveal how families search, how they integrate information from various resources, and how each family member’s skills and knowledge is used to enter those search terms that can be captured in logs.

To understand how collaborative Online Search and Brokering (OSB) occurs and the factors that impact OSB, we completed two home-visits with 23 Latino families in the Pacific Northwest. In the first home-visit we interviewed children (ages 10–17) and an adult family member separately about their experiences with technology and searching for information online. In the second visit we observed parent-child duos completing search tasks together using their devices and everyday processes.

Numerous factors impact the OSB process.

We learned families rely on many resources to solve their information needs. In this collaborative process, parents and children use their individual strengths, backgrounds, and skills, as well as extended friends and community members.

Despite their ability to leverage each other’s skills and pull from all these resources families still face challenges. One mother, Alicia, described how despite her daughter helping her write a job application, she was not able to post her job listing to an online neighborhood network.

Alicia (age 42, translation from Spanish): We [with help of my daughter] created an email account because it was required to sign up to a local neighborhood website where you can post and apply for jobs. Then I tried to log in… but I could not do it… I needed to be a member of the network… I am still not a member…

Alicia being an immigrant while navigating a new social environment lead to her being excluded from her community’s social network. Struggles like Alicia’s come from different interconnected factors, including parent limitations in digital literacy skills, access to resources, social connections and dealing with structural barriers.

Family members have mixed feelings about relying on each other.

We found that because each family member contributes a unique set of skills to the OSB process, this often created an environment where family members depended on each other and where tensions become evident. Teresa, mother of two, told us how she was conflicted about disclosing sensitive information to her children, but also felt she had limited options:

Teresa (age 45, translation from Spanish): I have been told that psychologists are now saying having children involved in so many adult decisions is not good for them… Who are we going to rely on when we need help?

Child participants shared with us that even when they wanted to help their parents, sometimes it was challenging to balance their parents requests while trying to do their homework:

Denise (age 14): I get frustrated because… I have my things to do, and I’m trying to hurry up…I’m helping them and … trying to do it like fast, but… I’ve got to do this fast because I have my homework.

Language translation makes OSB complex.

Sometimes, there was mistrust between parents and children because of doubt around the child’s Spanish language skills, translational abilities, and motivation to complete the task. The bilingual nature of OSB added another layer of complexity.

The level of bilingual skills needed to: navigate and find information in English, comprehend information in English, and then translate said information into Spanish is high. This complexity was heightened when parents needed their children to help them answer important questions related to banking, health, and politics. Despite the child’s desire to help, parents struggled to articulate their problem which led to children struggling to find answers to their parents’ questions. Ana, age 15, described:

Ana: Like, my dad’s shoulder pain…he’s giving me descriptions…there’s many things that it could go with…It might be pain… a nerve… there’s a lot of remedies that can help with it, but I can never tell him, it’s this specific one…

Despite facing challenges, families meaningfully engage digital tools.

It is very important to highlight how despite facing many barriers and challenges, families leveraged their available resources to search and find the information they needed. Children and parents found ways to search collaboratively (as seen in Figure 1). Elena, mother of two, described she split her phone screen with her daughter to work simultaneously on the same device:

Elena (age 40, translation from Spanish): I was with her [daughter] and I wanted to view videos. She needed to use the phone to do her homework … Then she said: ‘Wait mom, I will help you. You will see what you want on this side of the screen and I’ll be on the other half of the screen.’

 

A new form of searching: intergenerational, bilingual co-searching.

By examining how this community searches the internet for information we offer a new understanding of searching: co-searching that is intergenerational, bilingual, and between people with different set of digital skills and knowledge.

Our research uncovers the complexities of how children from ELL, Latino, low-SES, immigrant parents engage in collaborative online information problem-solving. Some questions that we hope to answer in future works include: How can we design software for collaborative intergenerational search to reduce the tensions that this practice implies? How does OSB manifest in communities other than the Latino immigrant community? How does OSB manifest between and elderly parent and adult child in lower-SES communities? In the future, we hope that more people study different kinds of families as they problem solve together using online information.

We thank the parents, children, and families that graciously welcomed us into their homes for this study.

Full Citation: Laura R. Pina, Carmen Gonzalez, Carolina Nieto, Wendy Roldan, Edgar Onofre, Jason C. Yip. 2018. ACM-Sheridan PACM Proceedings Sample File Title. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, CSCW, Article 140 (November 2018). ACM, New York, NY. 24X pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274409

 

This post originally appeared on Medium and appears here with permission.

Wendy Roldan is a PhD Student in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington.