“Mama, look at how I make the robot move!”
“Papa, let me show you how to make the robot turn.”

First- and second-graders were the computer science experts at University of Southern California when 35 families gathered to face two dozen robotics challenges. Over 225 children have been learning all year to code and program robots in the classrooms of nine Boyle Heights teachers involved in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering program called BOTS, for Building Opportunities with Teachers in Schools. And for four Saturdays in March, the families of 27 of those BOTS students have also learned how to code and use the engineering design process thanks to the El Círculo Familiar program, a collaboration between the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, PBS SoCal, the Critical Media Project, Sheridan Street Elementary School and USC Viterbi Adopt-a-Student, Adopt-a-Teacher. Finally, at USC for a culminating event, those parents could see how much their children had learned from their BOTS teachers and also apply their own, new coding skills to program the Sphero robots used in their children’s BOTS classes.

Students and volunteers solve mazes.

Teachers who have spent the last nine months in the BOTS monthly trainings also led the robotics challenges at USC on March 30. From St. Odilia School came Ms. Maria Garcia (first grade teacher) and Ms. Desiree Luna (second grade); from Sheridan Street Elementary were second-grade teachers Ms. Melissa Torres, Ms. Anita Lopez, and Ms. Tania Gomez; and from Murchison Street Elementary came Ms. Andriana Montijo and Ms. Ann Anderek (both first grade teachers), and Mr. Joseph Umaña (second grade). These teachers have been participating in monthly trainings since August so they themselves could learn coding through Code.org’s Computer Science Fundamentals curriculum and robotics using an original curriculum developed by the robotics students and staff of USC Viterbi Adopt-a-School, Adopt-a-Teacher. Over a dozen USC students and staff members have collaborated at every step of the way to empower teachers and their students in this goal, including Ph.D. student volunteers Justin Clough, Gautum Salhotra, Jackson Killian, and Tricia Chaffey.

Sheridan St. Elementary School teacher Ms. Torres and students think together.

The BOTS curriculum is currently being developed for submission to Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) as an official course for teachers in August, 2019. LAUSD Local District East will be the BOTS partner in the coming academic year, under the direction of East Superintendent Frances Baez with the support of STEAM Coordinator Craig Sipes and Technology Dr. David Billett. Families will be able to continue their robotics play over the summer at the East Los Angeles Weingart YMCA. Next year, the BOTS program will also be supported by numerous additional partners, including Mr. LeRoy Nelson, the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation, the Los Angeles Region Chamber of Commerce, and more.

While the future of robotics in Boyle Heights is set in the BOTS schools, the purpose of El Círculo Familiar is to make sure that computer science becomes more than a subject in school, but is a skill that can be shared by a whole family. Robotics and computational thinking already shape our society in so many ways, and the families of Boyle Heights are a key part of the ecosystem supporting this digital literacy.

This post was originally published on the USC Viterbi School of Education’s website and appears here with permission. Photos by Joseph Nakhost and Rick Bolton. Read this article in Spanish.

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Chris Chin, Executive Director of VR Content at HTC Vive, believes VR has the potential to play a positive role in building pathways for more equitable learning opportunities.

From Ready Player One to The Matrix, authors, futurists, and Hollywood have painted a picture of how VR could evolve in our lives—a future VR-driven world predicated on the usual suspects that we already encounter today: corporate greed, technology, and ultimately control of free will. In contrast, I see a decidedly brighter vision of the future of VR, one in which education, equity, and empathy play an increasingly large role in shaping our future and that of our children.

Image: Apollo 11

For reference, we need only look at the rise of mobile to understand how quickly technology can evolve to shape our lives. The early days of smartphones yielded basic calendaring, to-do lists, and web access, all revolutionary at the time. The most popular app in 2007, the iPhone’s first year, was a koi fish pond mini-game. Today, phones and tablets are ubiquitous and almost essential to daily life. In education, textbooks, assignments, and multimedia lessons are increasingly distributed and consumed through these devices, which have become tremendous resources for learning and information.

While VR has been around for decades, the first consumer-level high-end VR devices that launched in 2016 are analogous to the initial cellular phone “bricks” that predate the state-of-the-art devices we have today. Today’s VR, powered by a PC, is nonetheless amazing. With roomscale VR, anyone with an HTC Vive Pro can walk around and explore a 33’x33’ virtual space in HD resolution without being tethered to the PC, already a significant improvement from two-and-a-half years ago. Hundreds of educational VR experiences exist where students can learn about the human heart in full immersive 3D, navigate a Lunar lander 50 years after the first moon landing, or discover the secrets of the ancient pyramids.

While mobile has afforded tremendous change, VR has the capacity to go even further in impacting education and as a tool for equity. We know that experiential learning in VR can decrease a student’s cognitive load and help improve learning outcomes. We know from Dale’s Cone of Experience that learning by doing is much more effective for memory retention than reading, watching, or listening. VR’s ability to simulate any environment and have the student learn by doing effectively levels the playing field for all learners, whether they be visual, auditory, reading/writing, or kinesthetic.

This bodes well for the future as the field of artificial intelligence rapidly emerges. When learners can process a lesson in the format in which they learn best, and that’s coupled with adaptive learning AI and built-in assessment feedback loops, truly personalized learning can be achieved and education parity starts to become a reality.

Thus, the potential for equity in education becomes closer to reality in 10 years, along with increased development of empathy in our students towards the plight of others. Already, VR is helping students break stigmas around race and homelessness. In the future, we will see VR foster empathy for the diversity of circumstances we individually experience, including gender, background, ethnicity, religion, or physical or cognitive disability.

Finally, from a hardware standpoint, we will see device form factors become smaller, lighter, and more “accessorized.” With the advent of 5G mobile networks, we will “cut the cord” entirely and our mobile VR devices will take on the form of visors/glasses that can be comfortably worn all the time, with pass-thru ability for an augmented/mixed reality experience. Eye tracking and new brain-computing interface (BCI) sensors will form the basis for new ways of interaction and control with our virtual environments. And haptics embedded in our clothes and gloves will provide physical feedback and a level of immersion far more engrossing and realistic than ever before.

I look forward to this future, with better ways of learning for our students, more opportunities for equity in education, and a pathway towards a more empathetic world.

Chris Chin is Executive Director of VR Content at HTC Vive. He has 20+ years leading product, content, and business operations in gaming, mobile, and ed tech. He is passionate about the potential of VR in education and currently heads up education content and strategic initiatives at HTC Vive. @chrisforevr

This guest post by Anusha Subramanyam, PhD, BCBA-D and Tammy Kwan of Cognitive Toybox describes results from a pilot study in which Cognitive ToyBox, a game-based assessment program, was implemented in preschool classrooms to help teachers monitor their students’ progress.

Early childhood education programs require accurate, ongoing assessment to help students reach their school readiness goals. Our recent report, The Promise of Game-Based Assessment in Early Childhood Education, describes the challenge of current assessment systems and opportunities where direct assessment can help. It also provides pilot results from the 2017-2018 school year on how game-based direct assessment can reduce the assessment burden for teachers and increase teachers’ capacity to use data in real-time to improve instruction.

Game-based assessments automatically collect data on children’s learning and development.

Head Start and most state-funded Pre-K programs mandate child-level assessment, and programs are given the choice between observation-based or direct assessment. But there are crucial problems with an observation-only approach: it can be burdensome for teachers, can introduce bias from teacher ratings, and can cause reliability issues between different teachers. Moreover, the lack of standardization makes it difficult for programs to compare classrooms and identify ways to improve.

Direct assessment, in which a teacher presents an individual child with tasks or questions, offers an alternative approach. Compared to observation-based assessment, direct assessment is more standardized, which can increase the reliability and validity of assessment (Snow & Van Hemel, 2008; Waterman et al., 2012). Direct assessment also allows for easy comparison across children, classrooms and programs (Waterman et al., 2012).

To explore the potential of direct assessment, a Head Start program in New York City that oversees six early childhood education centers piloted Cognitive ToyBox, a game-based assessment platform. Cognitive ToyBox enables preschool teachers to assess school readiness through touchscreen games. Teachers let children play the games for five minutes per week, and they automatically get access to reports with child-level assessment data. The Head Start program worked with the Cognitive ToyBox team to customize the assessment platform to fit their program’s needs before piloting with four Head Start teachers in the 2017-2018 school year. All four teachers had Master’s degrees in early childhood education, and were certified to teach Birth through Grade 2 in the state of New York. Each class comprised of 17-20 students, all of whom were 3 or 4 years of age. Students attended preschool up to 10 hours a day, five days a week, and all classrooms followed similar schedules. Below is a brief summary of the findings from the pilot:

Game data is consistent with educator evaluations: Scores from game-based assessments were correlated with children’s performance in other direct assessments, such as the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test IV for preschoolers (r=0.60, N=36, m=3.4 years). Teachers also shared that the game data and scores were in line with their understanding of the classroom’s development level.

Game data gave teachers new insights on student development: One pilot teacher shared that in observing four to six children at a time during math small group, she often “missed kids”. She provided one example of a female student who was behind in language, and whom she had also assumed was behind in math. After reviewing the game-based assessments, she realized that the student was “a math whiz” and regrouped her appropriately. Without these results, the student would have remained in a mismatched instructional group, with potentially detrimental consequences. She risked starting school behind because she was inaccurately assessed.

Teachers can use assessment data from games to individualize question-asking and instruction on an ongoing basis.

Game data reduces assessment burden for teachers: In order to stay below the American Academy of Pediatrics screentime guidelines, each student engages with the assessment platform for an average of five minutes per week. Anecdotally, teachers have shared that the automatic documentation from the platform reduced their assessment time by 50% on a weekly basis.

Using a combination of observation and game-based direct assessments holds promise in reducing the burden on teacher time and improving the reliability and validity of early childhood assessment data. Moreover, structured, direct assessment allows for the development of reports and recommendations to understand how early childhood administrators can make improvements across a program level. Ultimately, better, simpler assessment reports will enable teachers to spend more time engaging in high-quality interactions to help every child thrive.

Read the full report here: The Promise of Game-Based in Early Childhood Education.

References

• Snow, C. E., Van Hemel, S. B., & Committee on Developmental Outcomes and Assessments for Young Children. (2008). Early childhood assessment: Why, what, and how. Washington, D.C: National Academies Press.
• Waterman, C., McDermott, P. A., Fantuzzo, J. W., & Gadsden, V. L. (2012). The matter of assessor variance in early childhood education – Or whose score is it anyway? Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 27(1), 46-54.

Download the novella, discussion guide, and #ArmMeWith lists as a PDF.

The stories that have emerged from the STEM School Highlands Ranch and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte shootings over the past few weeks have been heartbreaking. There is the story of sixth grader Nate Holley, who put his hand on a metal baseball bat, “just in case … ‘cuz I was gonna go down fighting if I was gonna go down.” There is the tragic heroism of Riley Howell at UNC-Charlotte, who was shot three times while tackling the gunman, risking his own life to save his classmates. And there is the chilling Twitter message that warned that shots had been fired on campus: “Run, Hide, Fight. Secure yourself immediately.”

These tragedies are among the 120 mass shootings in America so far this year—and two of eight that have taken place in institutions of learning since January 2019. These acts of violence have taken place in classrooms and school hallways–places that we used to think of as safe spaces for our children.  As I wrote in my Letter to the Editor that was published in The New York Times last month, “While we wait for gun reform legislation, we must do everything we can to arm our children and families—and educators—with tools to process their anxieties, fears and traumas.”

Last year, the #ArmMeWith hashtag went viral on social media as educators responded to proposals that teachers be armed with guns to prevent school shootings; instead, teachers shared requests for what they felt they needed to prevent further tragedy—from more books to bullying prevention programs. The #ArmMeWith movement inspired me to wonder: What if we were to arm parents and teachers with a curated list of stories, games, and resources that can give strength, empathy, and socio-emotional learning skills to young people growing up in the shadow of school shootings and lockdown drills?

This question led my studio Literary Safari to collaborate with children’s authors, leading game designers, and educators to create the following resources for parents, educators, and young people:

• A graphic novella, William H.G. Butler Middle School, about a fictional school in the aftermath of a school shooting (written in the style of Instagram posts)
• A discussion guide for parents, educators, and young people written by a middle school teacher, Toby Murphy
• #ArmMeWithBooks list of recommendations from 50 award-winning authors for young people in the age of school shootings
• #ArmMeWithGames list of 20 empathy and social-emotional learning game recommendations from leading game designers, researchers, and educators, including Joel Levin, the founder of MineCraftEdu and Dr. Karen Schrier, author of Knowledge Games and director of the Games and Emerging Media program at Marist College

Our Instagram-style William H.G. Butler Middle School graphic novella explores the impact of mass shootings on educators, families, and young people. As narrative designers, we know that stories are a powerful doorway through which to explore complex subjects. The discussion guide that accompanies our dystopian story is one that we hope parents and educators will use to have meaningful dialogues about what is happening in schools today, and to investigate ways that we can mobilize for change.

We also believe that stories and games can help young people navigate these complex times. While the media tend to be dominated with narratives that amp up a moral panic around video games, recent research studies have failed to find a link between the time spent playing violent video games and aggressive behavior. In fact, a study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that video games can boost empathy by changing neural connections in the brain. These findings are more important than ever by challenging the games are bad narrative.

Our #ArmMeWithGames list includes adventure, puzzle, battle, narrative, and live action role play games that have been designed to build empathy and social-emotional learning. Our #ArmMeWithBooks list features picture books, chapter books, fiction and non-fiction that inspires hope, resilience, and social change.

The resources we have created are available as a free downloadable publication here.  I invite you to download it, and to share it with one educator, one teacher, and one parent in your network.

Sandhya Nankani is the founder of Literary Safari, a NYC studio that creates inclusive media for children and families everywhere. Its clients have included  Nickelodeon, Sesame Learning, UNESCO, Benchmark Education, and PBS. Its work is rooted in an understanding of learning science, educational standards, narrative design, and good, old-fashioned fun! This fall, Literary Safari will launch Story Seeds™, a podcast, curriculum, and subscription box that brings together diverse and celebrated children’s authors and kid creatives.

Download the report here.

Do you remember when Niantic’s Pokémon GO was released in summer 2016 and how a craze with kids and families ensued? Are you excited for Harry Potter: Wizards Unite to be released sometime later this year and expect it to be a similar hit? Perhaps you’ve heard of Google Expeditions, which integrates VR and AR into classroom lessons? Or Nintendo Labo’s VR Kit, which has already sold out online, in just one week after its release? And what about all the virtual and mixed reality headsets that aren’t targeted at kids? Oculus Go, Rift, and Gear VR, Microsoft HoloLens, HTC Vive—the list goes on.

While augmented, virtual, mixed, and cross reality have been on the horizon for a while, it seems that these immersive media—hardware, software, and content—are becoming even more accessible and more prevalent in our lives. The question is—how will these technologies affect kids? And how can we prepare for a future in which immersive AR, VR, MR, and XR systems are more readily available to every household—before it happens? While some research has been conducted with research prototypes, there is still so much more to learn about how younger children engage with these media and how we can ensure that when kids do engage, they do so safely and productively.

That’s why last November 7 and 8, 2018, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, Dubit, and Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination and School for the Future of Innovation and Society brought together a cross-sectoral, multi-disciplinary group of 60 field leaders at the Future of Childhood Salon on Immersive Media and Child Development. Salon participants thoughtfully discussed and deeply reflected on immersive media (i.e., augmented, virtual, mixed, and cross reality) and young children, including the opportunities and challenges, as well as potential risks and benefits, for kids engaging with this hardware, software, and content.

Participants at the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development Salon at ASU in November 2018

As a co-organizer and attendant of this one-and-a-half day convening, I was able to participate in hands-on future-oriented activities with experts in research, design, education, pediatrics, policy, and more; listen to interesting spark talks on research, development, and visions of the future; and have meaningful discussions where we began to develop considerations for immersive media design, craft a research agenda, and narrow down priorities for policy, advocacy, and funding in this area.

One thing that was clear across all of the salon activities: we have a lot of work ahead of us! As designers and developers, we must create hardware, software, and content ethically, being cognizant of whether these technologies are really the right medium for the message we are trying to share with kids while taking into account children’s social-emotional, physical, and cognitive development and their diverse lives and identities. As researchers, we need to conduct research with diverse children, ask design and developmental questions, and keep in mind the ecological contexts where children learn, grow, play, and connect. As policymakers, advocates, and funders, we must ensure that children are safe, that adults in children’s lives (including parents, caregivers, teachers, and librarians) are informed to make wise decisions about immersive media, and that we raise the money we need to carry out relevant research.

Now is the time to proactively—individually and collectively—begin shaping an aspirational yet achievable future of childhood with immersive media.

For more information, read the full report on the Future of Childhood Salon on Immersive Media and Child Development here and view a playlist of some of the talks presented at the salon below.

A growing body of research points to the importance of engaging children in science from an early age, for both their future trajectories in science careers and school readiness. For some children, preschool provides the chance to engage in meaningful science learning. But, for the 46% of American 3- and 4-year-olds who do not attend preschool, opportunities for science enrichment are limited. For such children, accessing science experiences depends almost entirely on parents. However, many parents have limited experience supporting such learning.

To help these parents and their young children do more science together, public media producers at WGBH and researchers at the Education Development Center (EDC) set out to design and test a media-based intervention based on the Emmy Award-winning preschool science series PEEP and the Big Wide World. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the intervention’s design was based on the premise that media has the promise to be a powerful tool to model scientific thinking and practices, foster reflection, and engage and motivate children and adults alike. A particular focus of the R&D process was to ensure low-income families could use the resources without any special materials or new technology.

Home visiting organizations as the context for R&D
To meet the needs of our target families, the project used a design-based implementation research (DBIR) approach, partnering with two evidence-based home visiting organizations serving both English- and Spanish-speaking parents: AVANCE and HIPPY USA (Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters). With home visiting programs, trained early childhood specialists go into families’ homes to give parents the skills and tools they need to foster children’s healthy development and school readiness. Participation is voluntary, with programs often reaching parents who are socially or geographically isolated. More than three-quarters of households served by home visiting services report annual family incomes below the federal poverty guidelines. One-third of parents are under 21 years old, and a little under one-third do not have a high school diploma.

The PEEP Science apps are available in both Spanish and English for free in Google Play and the App Store.

PEEP Family Science digital app
The original design of the materials used a printed guide to direct parents through the steps of the intervention, which was provided on a website along with the videos. In response to initial pilot study findings that not all families were able to access the internet regularly, and that the printed guides were too text-heavy for some families, the developers embedded the videos and activities in apps that could be downloaded by parents at their regularly scheduled HIPPY or AVANCE parent group meeting, using the program’s Wi-Fi (or a hotspot). Families then were able to use the intervention at home without having to consume mobile data. The app provided all the resources in one place—not only PEEP animated and live-action videos, but also contextual prompts for parents, activity instructions, and short parent videos modeling positive adult/child engagement strategies. In essence, the app took the place of the printed parent guides that home visitors typically leave with families.

As we adapted the original plan to the app, we found some additional benefits to this approach: The app format required a limited use of text, broke activities into smaller incremental steps, and allowed for more visual prompts—important for parents with low levels of literacy. In addition, the format made it easier to encourage families to leverage the unique affordances of their smartphones to enhance their investigations. For example, they might document an activity by taking photos or recording video or sound, prompting parents and children to go back to watch, listen, and reflect on what they did and learned.

Through several rounds of research, we ultimately produced four separate PEEP Family Science apps— in both Spanish and English—exploring the topics of sounds, shadows, ramps, and colors. Each app contains four weeks of science exploration, encouraging two ½-hour sessions per week that combine watching a short video with doing a hands-on investigation. The apps are available for free on both Google Play and the App Store.

Research Findings
Our DBIR process culminated in an implementation study with over 200 low-income parents and 18 educators from HIPPY and AVANCE, located in urban and rural locations in Texas and Arkansas. Results indicate that almost all parents were able to use the PEEP Family Science apps with ease using their own technology, and that there were very few technical challenges.

• Observations of families indicated that parents and children used the intervention to explore core disciplinary ideas in physical science, such as testing and experimenting with how objects move on inclines; describing, identifying, and comparing colors; and exploring differences in the pitch and volume of sounds. Researchers also observed families using several science practices, including asking questions; planning and carrying out investigations; analyzing and interpreting data; using mathematics; and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information. Moreover, some parents reported their child learned new vocabulary and ways of talking about science from both the animated and the live-action videos in the app.
• Results from parent surveys suggest that parent attitudes and behaviors changed after using the intervention. In contrast to a comparison group of similar families, on average the intervention families reported greater frequency of science activities, greater confidence in their ability to help their children learn science, more use of parent engagement strategies and increased use of joint media engagement strategies.
• Families initially told us that there were barriers to doing science with their children because they felt that they themselves lacked knowledge or that they needed special materials. Later, families reported that the PEEP characters gave them a fun and easy entry point into doing science and that the animated stories were motivating.

Media can motivate families to engage in content they might otherwise perceive as complex or not relevant, and can be a powerful model for doing and talking about science, especially in contrast to typical approaches to parent engagement that rely on printed guides. However, parents and educators both need support in understanding best practices in media use to enhance children’s learning. The app has certain best practices built into its design—for example, each video session comes with questions for parents to ask their children, ensuring that screen time is an active rather than a passive experience, and every video session is immediately followed by a related hands-on science activity so children can connect the video to their own real-world experimentation. In contrast with other media that target children, this app was designed primarily for parent use, thus reinforcing the need for parents to co-use media with children. But our study findings indicate that parents and educators require additional, more explicit supports beyond the app to deepen their understanding of the advantages and pitfalls of using media as an educational tool.

Megan Silander is a researcher at the Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology. She conducts research on the use of digital tools and media to increase capacity to support children’s learning, both in and out of school. Her recent research has focused particularly on under-resourced families’ use of media and technology to support their children’s learning in the home. Megan holds a Ph.D. in education policy from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Gay Mohrbacher is senior project manager, WGBH Education, where she coordinates educational outreach to early childhood audiences for PBS station, WGBH. WGBH is recognized as a national leader in producing media-based resources to support learning and teaching. A top priority is serving under-resourced children, and working with national partners and local communities to overcome barriers to educational success.