Conducting playtesting with kids can be tricky. It can be challenging to get feedback from children that can really help producers make great products—but it’s definitely not impossible. We are thrilled to share Playtest with Kids, a new digital toolkit that shares best practices gathered from dozens of kids researchers.

“Do you like this?” seems like a very reasonable question to ask children. But we’ve noticed that asking this seemingly-straightforward question will often result in an immediate “yes!” —not because kids actually like the product but because they want to please the grown-ups conducting the playtesting session. Often, kids just want to be nice. So how do we get around that? 

Visit playtestwithkids.org

One of my favorite techniques from the Playtest with Kids toolkit is to ask if they think a product is for someone younger or older than them.

“I’m not sure what age this game is good for—do you think it should be for kids younger than you, about your age, or older than you?”

If they say younger or older, ask: “Why younger/older? How should I change it to make it better for your age?” 

I noticed that when I asked this question, kids became really honest about their opinions. They would tell me the game was for a younger kid because the character was “baby-ish” or it was for an older kid, because the gameplay was too confusing for them to understand. This was meaningful feedback for our product team.

The Playtest with Kids toolkit includes this method, and many more, all shared by those who playtest with kids across different types of products including apps, television, voice assistants, and physical toys. This project grew out of an opportunity that I, along with my friends and collaborators Maya Sussman and Megan Huang, saw in our own organizations and our colleagues’ organizations, where many recognize the benefits of conducting research with kids, but lacked the resources to do it effectively. 

It really took a village to bring this project to life. The methods were informed by dozens of experts in the field, from organizations including Google, YouTube Kids, Osmo, Square Panda, Toca Boca, Sago Mini, Facebook, MIT Media Lab, and Sesame Workshop. We shared early versions of the resource, including a card deck prototype, and more than a hundred volunteers reviewed and tested it. This included students who were new to playtesting as well as researchers, designers, and product managers who work on children’s products. 

The Playtest with Kids toolkit began as a deck of cards

What started as a card deck evolved into a website when we realized how playtesting needs change over the time—for instance, the demand for researching with voice assistants grew as well as the need for remote techniques. 

As we thought about partnerships and a home for our labor of love, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop was on the top of that list. We were thrilled when Lori Takeuchi, who was Head of Research at the Cooney Center at the time, wanted to partner with us to make this resource widely available to the kids’ product community. We’ve spent the past year putting finishing touches on the content and design of the website with Kiley Sobel (Duolingo) and Catherine Jhee. Sesame Workshop contributed case studies and playtesting protocol templates—fittingly, it was the first children’s program to utilize formative and summative research with children to plan, produce, and evaluate a television show.

Playtest with Kids just launched this month at the ASU+GSV summit. We were thrilled to have Jen Kotler of Google and Mariya Dey Roy of Amazon lend their support for the website and share their playtesting experiences.

We hope that you find the Playtest with Kids Toolkit useful – and fun! Please share it broadly. We hope that it will help inspire teams to implement thoughtful and productive playtesting sessions that lead to great products.

The Cooney Center team was honored to collaborate with our colleagues at Sesame Workshop to produce —and participate— in some panels at ASU+GSV that were full of rich insights into timely issues around early childhood, innovation, and equity. We’re grateful to all of our friends and partners who participated in our sessions and shared their expertise, and to the team at ASU+GSV for their partnership— and for these videos! If you weren’t able to attend the conference in person, you can still follow along with some very thoughtful discussions.

Playtest with Kids, a New Free Online Resource from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center
Playtest with Kids is an online toolkit designed to enable teams to create great products by conducting meaningful research with children. Moderated by Megan Huang (Google) and Maya Sussman (Parent Powered), the session featured Mariya dey Roy (Amazon), Jennifer Kotler (Google),  Kiley Sobel (Duolingo), and Cathy Tran (multiple companies) who shared best practices for playtesting with children.

Co-design with Kids: Enabling Meaningful Child Participation in the Private Sector in a Digital Era
This panel brought researchers and producers together to discuss the imperative of including children as stakeholders throughout the entire development process. Moderated by Michael Preston, the panel discussed examples of how research and industry partners have teamed up to  put learning, wellbeing, and DEI at the center of their products, and highlighted an upcoming report that makes the case for meaningful child participation in how companies design, develop, and deploy their digital products, services, activities, and initiatives. The session featured Jason Yip (University of Washington), Kim Foulds (Sesame Workshop), Rebecca Stringer (Kids Know Best), and Sarah Jacobstein (The LEGO Group).

Raising Our Collective Media Consciousness
As children make sense of the world around them, books, social media, pictures, videos, and games are all available at their fingertips, telling them stories about where they come from and who they should be. Kids are constant consumers of implicit and explicit messages that influence their identity development. Moderated by April Montgomery Goble (KIPP Chicago), this panel features a conversation with leaders across the field who are developing tools and practices to help adults raise their own awareness about what’s shared with kids and to help kids build the skills to engage with media consciously. With Michael Preston (Joan Ganz Cooney Center), Linda Burch (Common Sense Media), Brittany Jones (KIPP Chicago), Manjeet Sareen (Natterhub), and Marc Brackett (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence).

More videos from ASU+GSV 2022 are available here.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce a new opportunity for media-savvy youth to get involved in shaping the public media landscape!

As part of our By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences project, we have recently opened applications to join a new Youth Fellowship program that will run from May 2 to August 31. All high schoolers between the ages of 14 to 18 in the U.S. are invited to apply! And did we mention that this is a paid opportunity? Students will receive a $500 stipend for their participation. We anticipate the commitment will be 1-2 hours a week over the next four months. Meetings will take place online.

Fellows will have a platform to influence public media stations around the country. We’re hoping that the group of Fellows will be diverse in many ways, and as individuals that they are:

• “media savvy” — they think and engage deeply around news, media, new technologies, online life, etc.
• comfortable collaborating with peers and with adults.
• comfortable expressing their perspectives and listening to the perspectives of others.

If this sounds like a young person you know, please share this information with them.

The deadline to apply is April 15. 

Find the flier, FAQ, and the link to the application here.