The following post was originally published by the Children’s Media Association and appears here with permission.

On June 3, 2020, The New York Times published an article titled, “Please Stop Showing the Video of George Floyd’s Death” by Melanye Price. Ms. Price made the case that repeated showings of this and other videos of African Americans being brutalized by police have not led to change and may be having unintended consequences such as “reinforcing pernicious narratives that black lives do not matter while affirming the actions of people” who commit the terrible acts. Her arguments are important and deserve our attention. I wonder if by repeated showings of such images, however, including the scenes we see daily — of protestors being mishandled by police, windows being smashed, stores being looted — are having another unintended consequence.

This article brought to my mind an experience I had soon after 9/11. At that time, I was an executive at a cable company that hosted an extensive line-up of programs targeted at children ages 3–12 years. A few days after 9/11, our executive team met to discuss what, if anything, we should do in response to the tragedy. My department promulgated the policies and practices the network adhered to for our children’s programming. We acknowledged reports from the child development community about how children, particularly young children, when seeing the images over and over of planes flying into tall buildings, buildings crumbling, and fires breaking out on TVs watched by their parents thought that these events were happening again and again. Researchers began to look differently at how large-scale crises that are covered by wall-to-wall media affect children.

Before 9/11, psychologists typically considered only children who witnessed trauma or experienced a direct loss to be at higher risk for mental health consequences in the ensuing weeks and months, observed Robin Gurwitch, a faculty member in the Duke University Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Center for Child and Family Health. The attacks on 9/11 — and the saturation and repetition of those terrifying images — changed that.

“Many children were too young to understand that what they were seeing was the same footage being repeated,” Gurwitch said. “They thought more and more towers were falling.”

At our staff meeting, we discussed these early findings and made the case that it was our collective responsibility to acknowledge that these images were traumatizing to young children. That led us to wonder if similar images might exist in our own programming line-up and whether such images could contribute to the trauma.

We made the decision that we needed to examine current programs for similar images and scrub them from the shows. It took us a while to review the programming. We were quite surprised by the number of images we found in the “animated action-adventure” and “superhero” series. We did indeed find examples of superheroes firing lasers into skyscrapers causing them to burst into flames. There were scenes of animated characters running from falling buildings. We found an instance of lasers fired at an enemy plane causing it to careen to the ground. We edited out all of these scenes.

My experience leads to me ask — is this happening again with the repeated images of not only the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police but also the violence captured in videos of the protests in the streets? Are young children again thinking that these incidents are happening over and over again?

It also begs the question of whether similar review and editing is required of today’s programming lineups to mitigate the potentially deleterious impact on children. Are there scenes of superheroes or even law enforcement officers “reinforcing pernicious narratives” about minorities? Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, noted this in a recent newsletter:

“Scientific research has demonstrated that biases thought to be absent or extinguished remain as ‘mental residue’ in most of us. Studies show people can be consciously committed to egalitarianism, and deliberately work to behave without prejudice, yet still possess hidden negative prejudices or stereotypes.”

My colleagues in the children’s media community are well-meaning, intelligent, well-informed people, but these are different times and we need to look inward. Are there images in programs targeted to children that include hidden, unconscious biases, subtle discrimination, and stereotypes? Are there images that reinforce attitudes about in-groups or out-groups? Is the omission of some ethnic groups another way of conveying unconscious prejudice?

Let’s look honestly and consciously at the images that we have offered to children, in mainstream media and children’s programming. We can do better. We must do better. This is a call to action.

 

 

Donna Mitroff is the Founder of The Kidvocate Group, LLC. She is an educator and children’s media expert with nearly three decades of experience in both the non-profit and entertainment industry including commercial broadcasting, cable and public television. She consults with production companies, networks and studios in the areas of program development, content design and review, children and families and media use, media policy, and media impact. She is currently the Head of the Advisory Board of the Children’s Media Association Bay Area. Donna started her media career in Pittsburgh where she worked with Fred Rogers of “Mister Rogers Neighborhood.” She holds a PhD in Education and an MA in Special Education.

Mindy Brooks is the Director of UX for Google Play, and one of the key masterminds around the creation of a new Kids section that features Teacher Approved apps on Google Play. Her kids and family team focuses on designing technology that meets the needs of families around the world and helps other teams understand developmental principles for families that help drive product design and vision. Mindy is also an alumna of Sesame Workshop, where she was Director of Content & Research. We were thrilled to have the opportunity to catch up and learn more about this new initiative came together.

 

The new “Teacher Approved” section of the Google Play Store is an ambitious effort to help families find highly-rated apps for kids. We’d love to hear more about how it came together.
In April, we launched a new section in the Google Play Store labeled “Kids,” where teacher-reviewed and rated apps are located. Building off of the work we have already done for Families in the Play Store, we are going a step further to make sure that every single app in the newly launched Kids tab has been reviewed and rated by teachers.  

The ratings are based on a rubric developed in consultation with a group of expert advisors led by Joe Blatt from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Dr. Sandra Calvert from Georgetown University. We then recruited teachers from across the U.S. to rate each app using this rubric. Parents can now see experts’ ratings for each app, providing them with an easy way to find vetted and age-appropriate content for their children. It caters to three age groups: 0-5, 6-8, and 9-12 years old.  

Why was it so important to you to launch Teacher Approved content on Google Play?
One thing we take very seriously is listening to our users—and in this situation, it’s parents. We’ve heard for years from parents around the world that it’s really difficult to identify high-quality content for children among the vast array of offerings. In order to locate the great apps that are out there, parents have had to do a lot of the heavy lifting to find quality content that fits their child’s needs. It was important to me, as someone with an education and child development background, to ensure that the largest app store in the world contained a separate section with clear badging that was deemed high quality by trustworthy experts—teachers.

The importance of this launch was underscored by its timing. We had been working on this program for over three years. As you can imagine, developing the rubrics, hiring hundreds of teachers, and then having them review the thousands of kids’ apps we have in the Play Store takes a long time. The original launch date had been forthis summer, but with the lockdown, we found that parents were asking more than ever for help finding high-quality apps for their kids. So we did what only a company with the scale and resources of Google can do, and pushed up the entire launch by two months so we can be helpful for parents when they need our help most. We wanted to take the guesswork out of finding high-quality apps on our store right as they were dealing with substantially increased childcare stressors.  

How do you define high-quality? What are teachers looking for when they review apps?
Great question. Over the past few years, we’ve worked extensively with our advisors to develop a framework for rating apps for kids. This was a multi-phased approach in which we refined, piloted, and refined some more. The result is a framework that includes design quality, appeal, enrichment potential, and content appropriateness based on age. Not all content needs to be educational, but it does need to support a child’s healthy development.  And of course, as should be the case for any kids’ apps, we looked for delight! 

Why human curation? Could this be done by technology?
We believe it’s important that when developing frameworks for rating content, we lean on experts themselves to tell us what is good. In this situation, our experts are teachers. We believe they have the child development expertise and intuition to identify what is good for kids. 

It’s U.S.-based now—do you have plans for expansion?
Yes! We are currently working on the global expansion of the program. When we began developing our framework for rating apps, it was critical that we vet our rubrics globally to ensure relevance in other regions of the world. We worked with our public policy colleagues at Google in 18 countries throughout Latin America, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, North Africa, and across mainland Europe and the UK to make sure that the rubrics were universal in their applicability. We developed a foundation for ratings based on a global child development framework. 

What kind of support are you offering the developers of kids’ content who are impacted by this program?
Our developers have been top of mind as we developed this framework. We’ve developed detailed training materials and learning modules for kids developers. And in three years of developing these rubrics and reviewing thousands upon thousands of kids’ apps, we’ve gained a lot of insight into what it takes to develop great apps for kids.  So we took all those learning and just recently launched design guidelines for creating content for kids based on them.  

What’s next for kids at Google?
Google wants to be as helpful as it can be to the whole family, and kids are no exception! There are a lot of different initiatives underway that focus on helping children and parents get the most out of technology. We want to bring this content and these tools to children all over the world. Stay tuned throughout the year!

 

Corinne Brenner, a researcher and learning scientist at Killer Snails, a development studio that produces science games, moderated a panel at iLRN 2020 about the use of XR for learning in informal environments on June 25, 2020. Corinne shares highlights from the panel, which took place in a virtual environment, with us here.

 

The Immersive Learning Research Network (iLRN) was uniquely equipped to rethink the plans for its 6th annual conference in light of COVID-19. The organization’s members are at the forefront of innovating and sharing immersive experiences for education, so they were willing to explore new technologies and translate the planned events to be entirely online experiences.

In the featured plenary panel “Who, Where, Why? Using XR for Learning in Informal Contexts,” I moderated a discussion between four researchers and practitioners who use virtual, augmented, and mixed reality in a variety of informal learning contexts. A recording of the panel is available here. We (or rather, our customized avatars) were “onstage” speaking in front of a virtual audience from around the world, while our real-world selves were all at a safe physical distance. The audience was able to zoom in to the slide deck, and react and pose questions throughout the panel via a chat interface in VirBELA and YouTube comments. iLRN’s Discord channel also provided a way to continue conversation threads and connect with panelists and interested participants.

During the panel, we started by sharing the who, what, and why of each panelist’s work with XR: the populations they work with, examples of their XR projects and content domains, and why XR is the right tool for education in their informal setting.

Karen Alexander, the director of XRConnectED and co-president of the Pittsburgh Chapter of the VR/AR Association, facilitates community-based out-of-school programs in Pittsburgh, PA. Children, teens, and adults learn to use XR authoring tools and tell stories in new media, using interdisciplinary and collaborative skills. Karen shared how during a workshop at the Lighthouse Project, students learned that 17-year-old Antwon Rose had been shot in the back and killed while fleeing from the police. As a result, one of the groups made their 360 video on gun violence. A link to that video can be found here.

Dan Roy is a Research Scientist at the MIT Education Arcade. Dan leads game design for the Collaborative Learning Environments in VR project, and spoke about using the game Cellverse in a museum setting to test an exploration of cellular biology with diverse audiences, as well as the impact working on the project had on undergraduate students developing the project. This was often the first experience using VR for many people in the museum, so having staff nearby to help guide users’ experience with the hardware was key. By helping users become comfortable enough to explore the virtual environment, they could actually engage with the content to be learned. The team used this experience in their design of a non-player character and tutorial in the app.

Kiley Sobel spoke about her experience researching children and families’ use of XR with games like Incloodle and Pokémon Go, as well as her work as a Research Scientist at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center focusing on the responsible, inclusive, and equitable design of emerging technologies and new media for children. For children, social-emotional learning and skills like sharing are often learning goals in informal learning contexts. The concept of joint media engagement captures what happens when people learn together with media. In Kiley’s experience, XR games created opportunities to negotiate physical space, handle a shared device, and take on roles like using an iPad camera to take a picture of another user.

Vivian Trakinski works with XR in her role as the Director of Science Visualization at the American Museum of Natural History. The audience of visitors at the museum includes many different types of learners who have their own learning goals. Like Dan, Vivian described a VR installation that required docents to guide people to using VR head-mounted displays and controllers for the first time. Designing experiences for all ages, levels of background knowledge and English proficiency, and often very limited time is a challenge. XR experiences at the museum have been successful when they use the genuine artifacts of science and put them in an environment for deep exploration. In areas of study like climate change and biology, those artifacts may be large datasets, or digitized collections. This work will continue with a project exploring how immersive technology and data visualization can combine to give museum audiences more context for exhibited objects.

Audiences appreciated hearing about the variety of applied examples, but also had great questions for the panelists expand on. Karen, Vivian, and Kiley’s experiences with neurodiverse learners and XR ran the gamut from creating new projects in a Pittsburgh after-school program, designing an inclusive game for children with mixed abilities, and designing museum installations to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

A concern of audience members and panelists was how COVID-19 would change the way we interact with XR tools. Most panelists mentioned how the expensive hardware was a limiting factor in sharing their work or conducting research, and sanitizing devices or obtaining a 1:1 ratio of students to devices would be a challenge. COVID-19 represents challenges to the way makerspaces and museums have been functioning the last few years, but the panelists could also imagine ways to adapt. Vivian shared a project at AMNH bringing more of the collection into the digital world. The many millions of artifacts can never be shared with the same depth and care in the physical location of the museum, but the potential for XR tools to transcend physical boundaries opens up new opportunities.

One of the most interesting aspects of the conversation was how each panelist talked about how their design process accounted for challenges. In museums and out-of-school settings, their project was often the first time participants used XR interfaces. Planning for interruptions and limited time with the technology made the experiences mentioned more usable, enjoyable, and informative from a learning perspective.

Thanks again to the panelists and conference organizers for inspiring this conversation!

 

Corinne Brenner is a researcher and learning scientist with Killer Snails, where she helps create and study games that inspire a love of science. She is also pursuing a PhD in Educational Communication and Technology at NYU. Corinne’s research interests include applying quantitative methods to understand human behavior, impact evaluation, and examining the affordances of immersive technology for education and entertainment. She received her BA in Psychology from Cornell University, and MSc in Social Psychology and Psychological Methods from the University of Amsterdam. 

“It’s hard to think of a more important audience than kids who are developing their sense of self and their connections to their communities all in this fairly messy and quickly evolving media landscape.”  – Michael Preston

Even before the massive disruptions that have now defined 2020, public media leaders were expressing a growing urgency to address the many and diverse needs of youth audiences, who today have more options at their fingertips than ever before within an overwhelming media landscape. Tweens and teens rely on digital and networked media to learn, play, create, and stay connected with each other. Where does public media fit in? And can public media play a unique and consequential role in cultivating the future generation of our nation’s leaders, by engaging and empowering them as they are beginning to develop their own sense of self? How can we build the capacity of public media organizations in local communities to support a wide range of youth-centered activities including creativity, communication, civic participation, learning, and play? 

In the latest episode of the 30,000 Hours podcast, Cooney Center Senior Fellow Monica Bulger and Executive Director Michael Preston discuss By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences, our collaboration with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to explore the future of public media for young audiences.

With the Next Gen Public Media project, the Cooney Center will conduct research on youth media practices—including the creation of media by, with, and for tweens and—while exploring opportunities for public media to define a vision to engage young audiences. Our project team includes Mary Madden and Monica Bulger, veteran youth and media researchers who are examining the many ways young people currently engage with media to get a better understanding of what they are doing, what they are learning, and what they’re looking for. Rafi Santo has already begun working directly with public media organizations to learn more about their current practices with young audiences. Through this project, we hope to surface practices and opportunities that public media have not yet tapped and to find innovative strategies to better engage tweens and teens.

Listen to the podcast to learn more about the project. And stay tuned for more information in the coming months!

 

 

In May 2020, IDEO launched the COVID-19 Reimagine Learning Challenge as a global call to invite parents, students, and educators to share ideas to address the educational challenges that we are facing now. The Challenge drew more than 400 responses from around the world within the three-week submission period. Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center are proud partners of this innovation challenge.

The post below was originally published on the IDEO website and appears here with permission.

 

In two months, the world of education has shifted faster than it has in the past 200 years. Seemingly overnight, nine out of every ten students in the world were sent home. Elementary school students missed their friends. High school seniors missed prom. College students missed graduation. Teachers lost their classrooms. Parents lost their childcare. One thing not missing, however, was innovation.

From New York to Nairobi, educators, parents, and students have been finding ways to keep on learning. Many of the creative workarounds that have emerged in response to the pandemic are more than Band-Aid solutions; they are postcards from the future. Hidden within these adaptations are clues to how education might evolve.

The pandemic has both surfaced new needs and exposed the brokenness of our existing system. As designers who bend towards optimism, we view these needs as opportunities to build back better. We aren’t blindly optimistic, of course. Systems that work well for some and not for others didn’t get that way by accident—they were designed that way and could be reinforced if we aren’t purposeful.

We also know that there are many people out there who are already thinking about possible solutions, so we put out an ask to those doing the work to reform education: How might we adapt to remote learning while also using this moment to radically reimagine what we need our education systems to be?

In just three weeks, we received nearly 450 responses. We heard from parents and students, but also architects and entrepreneurs, whose insights you’ll read in the quotes below. A panel of high school students reviewed promising submissions, and top ideas will receive support from HundrED, Sesame Workshop, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, TED-Ed, and IDEO to bring them to life. But in the meantime, we were too inspired not to share some of the early ideas with you.

1. Equity will no longer be an afterthought

“When learning from home, not all students have equal time or space to focus on their classwork.” —Kristen Myers, Communication Designer, Chicago, IL

The pandemic has amplified existing equity gaps and brought new ones into stark relief. Simply put: when students are less visible, it’s easier for them to simply disappear. And if a student’s house doesn’t have reliable internet, it doesn’t matter how much they show up ready to learn—the barrier to success is structural. Instead of trying to rectify inequities after they emerge, schools must proactively make decisions that serve students proportional to their needs.

We were particularly inspired by some ingenuity from countries where access to technology is less reliable. The country of Panama, for example, crowdsourced lessons from its best public school teachers and broadcast those classes on national TV. For the last five minutes of each lesson, a special ed instructor explains adaptive techniques for families whose kids have special needs.

By sharing lessons on television, over 6 million students across Panama had access to the country’s best teachers. Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean leveraging the latest technology. Panama’s approach meets students’ needs at scale. In the future, being radically inclusive will be the norm, not the exception.

2. The “classroom” will be everywhere

“Arts centres, museums, libraries, forest schools, universities, they could be used to accommodate small cluster groups (same children and teacher at all times) to help spread the school population across venues in communities.” —Nia Richards, Learning Experience Designer, Wales, UK

With no vaccine yet in sight, returning to a physical campus in the fall is a daunting challenge. But hidden within the challenge to adapt to this new normal hides a larger truth: Schools’ biggest constraints are their own walls.

What if we saw this not as a space constraint but a space opportunity? When you expand the boundaries of the classroom, there’s almost limitless untapped potential. In response to our ask, we received dozens of innovative uses of physical space. From garden classrooms where students can learn from their natural environment to virtual classrooms that connect students from around the world, expanding our perspective on where learning can happen broadens how and what we teach. And when students learn in the context of the real world, they’ll be better equipped to solve real-world problems.

3. Students will manage their own schedules

“The schedule … It’s archaic. It’s inflexible. It no longer works in today’s society.” —Kevin Varano, High School History Teacher, Lancaster, PA

For the past few months, we’ve all been living in a time warp. Days pass in blinks. Weeks last for months. The markers of time seem arbitrary. But the same was true for students before the pandemic—the school day, school year, and division of subjects are all constructs. The fact that the school day ends at 3pm and has a three-month summer holiday may work for families who can afford childcare and camp, but not for families who can’t. The rigidity of school schedules is a structural barrier to equity.

Then there’s the schedule of the school day. Josh Stern, a rising senior in high school from New York, believes a lot of his work was limited by the demands of the standard school day. During quarantine, he’s been able to do his work when he’s feeling most energized and take mid-day meetings with professionals in fields that he’s interested in pursuing.

During this crisis, students like Josh have been managing their own time while balancing school with hobbies, work, and family care. It will be hard to pull that flexibility back. It’s time for schools to adopt flexible schedules that better meet the needs of students.

4. Schools will support families rather than just the other way around

“Parents (such as myself) became involuntary Teaching Assistants overnight when schools closed. We had no preparation, no experience and, frankly, no clue as it came to teaching.” — Erik Mooij, Parent, Utrecht, Netherlands

If we have learned anything from the past few months, it’s just how hard teaching can be. Families are developing an intimate understanding of all that goes into helping their children learn—and schools are developing an intimate understanding of how ill-equipped they are to help families serve their children. In the future, schools will rethink how they can better support families.

Take Kidappolis, a bilingual learning app that helps families stay engaged in their children’s education through SMS-based updates. When parents are empowered to help their children, not only will families become more invested in their children’s success, but learning outcomes will improve too.

5. There will be new measures of success

“Using standardized tests to evaluate schools exacerbates inequity & distorts educational purpose.” — Hi Howard, Nonprofit Executive Director, Denver, CO

For years, test results have been the metric that matters for teachers, students, and schools. But during the pandemic, the outsized importance of grades, tests, and attendance has paled in the presence of greater needs—like whether a student has a computer to use or enough to eat. We’ve seen how, for students, school and life are not separate entities. It’s hard to focus on finishing an assignment when you have to watch over your baby sister. That will hold true on the other side of this global pandemic.

For far too long, we’ve relied on proxies for what students know—courses completed, grade level, and test scores—rather than giving students an opportunity to show what they know. Moving forward, we’re encouraged by competency-based approaches to assessment that reward a broad definition of growth.

We’ve been blown away by the innovation borne out of the constraints of the pandemic. Schools around the world have tapped their communities to buy and distribute hundreds of thousands of laptops to students in need. Remote learning plans that could have taken districts years have been implemented in weeks. Teachers have found ways to bring creativity, joy, and levity to this heavy moment.

Though everyone is rapidly adapting, systemic change is far from guaranteed. Ensuring that student- and family-centered solutions stick will require following the lead of those doing the work. Educators, families, and students have ideas for how to reimagine the future of learning. Let’s use this time to listen to their voices.

Learn more about OpenIDEO’s Reimagine Learning Challenge here. You can also sign up for Challenge updates here.

 

 

Simone Stolzoff, Senior Communication Designer, IDEO San Francisco, is a writer focused on the future of work and workforce development. Before IDEO, he was a journalist for The Atlantic, WIRED, and Quartz, covering the same topics.

Lia Wesp, Production Designer, IDEO San Francisco, brings a graphic design focus to IDEO San Francisco’s production design team. While embracing imperfections and obsessively hoarding printed matter, she has cultivated a design practice that celebrates the unusual and tactile. In her “spare time” you can find her listening to Dolly Parton and Black Sabbath while pretending to garden.