Where were all the influential tech and media companies hanging out in early March? They were all at SXSW 2023— and so was the Cooney Center! We’re back from an amazing few days of hanging out in Austin with innovators who are shaping our future, and are thrilled to share some of our highlights from an incredible few days here.

With two panels and a very popular LEGO Play Lounge during the conference’s Design Track, the Cooney Center, in collaboration with the LEGO Group, the LEGO Foundation, the Fair Play Alliance, and Riot Games, was able to reach a wide swath of designers with messages about the importance of thoughtfully creating digital spaces that contribute to the thriving of both kids and adults.

Cards showing the eight well-being outcomes on one of the building tables at the LEGO Play Lounge

At the Designing Tech for Children’s Well-Being panel, speakers shared learnings, resources, and advice from the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) initiative founded by the LEGO Group and UNICEF and supported by the LEGO Foundation. 

Cooney Center Executive Director Michael Preston described how RITEC partners UNICEF and Western Sydney University conducted research with children to develop a framework with eight well-being outcomes: competence, emotional regulation, empowerment, social connection, creativity, safety and security, diversity, equity and inclusion, and self-actualization.

Jan Plass, from NYU’s Create Lab, walked the audience through how his team is testing the framework by having children play specially selected games and measuring their well-being responses. Elizabeth Milovidov explained why the LEGO Group, a toy company, is interested in exploring how to create safe, positive digital play experiences for children (“because that is where kids are!”). And Jen Kotler from Google’s Kids and Family Team described how she uses the well-being framework, or “the RITEC Eight” as she calls it, to check that the products that her team is developing are aligned and incorporate elements like empowerment and creativity.

When asked what advice they would give the designers in the room, Jan said, “The first step is awareness. And the best place to start would be to look at the [RITEC] framework and all the different facets of what well-being could look like and what that would mean to you as a designer.”

Elizabeth flipped the question, asking designers for their help:

“You, the designers and the digital designers. It’s just amazing the power and the strength that’s in this room to help us all figure it out,” she said. “By creating something where digital well-being is already integrated, well-being by design is already there, it becomes easy to say, oh yeah, well, this is great. My child is going to feel better when they get off. My child will have agency. My child will have competence when they close their screen or shut down that game.”

Designing Tech for Children’s Well-Being

In the Designing for Digital Thriving panel, Riot Games, Blizzard, Fair Play Alliance, IDEO and the Cooney Center came together to address the question: How can we create & foster healthy, inclusive digital spaces that enable individuals and communities to thrive? As we spend more and more time in digital spaces, whether it’s on our phones, in Zoom meetings, or streaming our favorite games or tv shows, we need to collectively find a way to make these spaces safer and allow for all individuals to be their authentic selves both in life and online.

While we know this won’t be solved overnight, we do know where we can start, and that’s with games. Weszt Hart and Natasha Miller, executive steering committee members of the Fair Play Alliance, spoke at length about why games are a great roadmap for all other industries when it comes to figuring out how to design with digital thriving in mind. 

Natasha, who is a Senior Research Scientist at Blizzard Entertainment, talked about how behavior is a product of people and their environment— and in games, we can control the environment. “Because we can have complete control, we’re able to actually measure impact, making games the ideal space to measure to know whether or not we are effective at enacting change,” said Natasha. Weszt, Head of Player Dynamics at Riot Games, added that what makes games so valuable is the richness of the medium. “It’s more than just playing games,” said Weszt. “Since playing games is a holistic experience, we believe games offer the greatest opportunity to solve the greatest number of problems for the greatest number of people.

Michael Preston discussed the lessons that games can teach all of us regardless of industry. Games are played by 3 billion people globally, and we know the vast majority of kids play games, so it’s a fantastic way to reach them,” said Michael. “But before we can reach them we need models for the field that can translate this work into practice.” 

More information about the Designing for Digital Thriving work can be found here.

We wrapped up our time at SXSW with our heads filled with thoughtful questions and ideas from the designers we spoke with. We are inspired by the creative energy of all those we met who are working to build new things. We are looking forward to incorporating all that we’ve learned into our work to provide designers with tools and resources to help them create with children and adult well-being at their heart. 

Watch the Designing Tech for Children’s Well-Being panel here:

Watch the Designing for Digital Thriving panel here:

 

Oko founder Matt Miller engages in co-design with children at The GIANT Room

Educational media for children should be designed to ensure learning is meaningful and playful. Children should actively engage with content, connect material to what matters to them, and have a joyful and social experience.¹  However, research shows that many apps are not designed in ways that support these and other research-based principles.²

One way to ensure that new technologies meet children’s needs is to involve them in the design process. Allison Druin, a leader in the Cooperative Inquiry field and founder of KidsTeam, defines several levels at which children can be part of the technology development process: user, tester, informant, and design partner.³ As users, children are consumers of the technology after it’s widely available. As testers, they try the technology before it’s widely available and provide feedback. As informants, children may have input at various points during the design process and engage in a dialogue with adult developers. Finally, as design partners, children are equal shareholders with adults throughout a design process in which they engage in elaborating on each other’s ideas.

How do these different types of child-centered design play out in practice? The Joan Ganz Cooney Center recently launched the Sandbox, an applied R&D initiative to help digital media innovators center children’s learning, development, and experience in their product design process. Through the Sandbox, we aim to:

• help designers and developers in becoming “kid-literate” by understanding how research and participatory methods can create products that better engage kids
• engage kids from diverse backgrounds to ensure inclusive input into the product ideation process
• build better products that achieve their intended impact and lead to positive outcomes that align with the principles of meaningful and playful learning.

In 2021, we partnered with an early-stage product team to explore ways to mobilize current research and include children in the design process. Entrepreneur Matt Miller had recently begun developing Oko, a new AI-based platform that facilitates small group learning activities, and was a committed partner in this process, which included a series of online co-design sessions with Dr. Jason Yip’s KidsTeam at the University of Washington. One year later, after developing the product further, he returned to bring children’s voices back into the process to further his goals of making Oko engaging, collaborative, and educational.

To initiate a new round of child-centered design, the Cooney Center and Oko partnered with the NYC-based creative STEM learning organization The GIANT Room. Together we designed in-person sessions that would meet the needs of all stakeholders by engaging kids as testers and design partners while providing critical ideas and feedback to the product team. We began with a series of sessions that involved children ages 7-12 playtesting the current version of Oko, specifically with a math activity called “crazy calculator”. Playtesting involves conducting user research with children, using a variety of age-appropriate techniques, to help them share their thoughts and learn how to give constructive feedback. In addition to identifying bugs or places where they felt frustrated, we asked them to share their first impressions, how they felt playing the game, and if they would like to play in the future. Kids’ feedback provided opportunities for immediate fixes in the product that resulted in a big impact on their gameplay. For example, Oko’s designers adjusted the pace of the software to allow more time for “thinking” and “brainstorming” among players after one child reported, “I wanted to answer but didn’t get the chance”. They also adjusted the wording of the feedback provided to users to help build math confidence and to encourage them in deeper mathematical thinking.

After playtesting, to encourage more generative thinking, participants were invited to come up with their own ideas for a new game or new features for Oko, make a prototype using a range of everyday arts and crafts materials or creative tools, such as a laser cutter or Scratch, and share their ideas with other participants.

“The GIANT Room is for kids with GIANT dreams who dare to act on them. We know kids have wonderful ideas to share. If given the opportunity, they design the most magical tools, toys, and products that can enlighten millions of other kids around the world,” said Dr. Azi Jamalian, founder of The GIANT Room. “Through our partnership with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Sandbox, we’re giving kids a seat at the table to have an impact on our collective future by directly influencing learning tools that are designed for their generation. Having a voice in designing their own education journey is the first step for them to build the world they would like to live in.”

These playtesting plus prototyping sessions also yielded ideas for longer-term design decisions and questions, such as how to give kids more agency in controlling the game while also meeting curricular goals. Participating in the sessions allowed product developers to witness spontaneous moments of what kids enjoyed and learned from the game. For example, children learned new math concepts from each other, such as when an older participant answered a question about how to make 56 by entering 56×1 into the calculator; younger participants thought her solution was silly until they learned that when you multiply a number by 1, you get the same number. It also inspired ideas for questions that would be better answered by engaging in deeper design partnership with the children, such as how kids wanted to customize the game and what elements of game design they enjoyed most.

We proceeded to conduct two co-design sessions that were aligned with principles of Cooperative Inquiry, in which children and adults partnered to inform the product design.⁴ Critically, each small group of children worked with two adults to engage in ideation and co-creation. These adults did not take on the role of educators, but rather were available to listen to and discuss ideas. One of these sessions was designed around a prompt to create a game that encourages collaboration between players. Each small group designed games which they then shared with the wider group, which enabled the developer to consider game elements and characteristics that might be applied in the product, such as working together against a common foe or including scavenger hunts with clues.

Overall, these sessions were incredibly valuable for the Oko team to create a roadmap of child-informed product design goals for immediate, near-term, and long-term implementation.

Oko founder, Matt Miller shared that “Involving children in Oko’s development, through both playtesting and co-design, has helped us to better understand what works – and what doesn’t – for small group engagement, all while ensuring that learning activities remain cognitively challenging. We’ve also found that kids’ unique and unbridled perspectives are often refreshing and surprising – yielding a more creative product roadmap.”

The children involved in the sessions enjoyed creating and collaborating around the design questions; when asked how much their children enjoyed the workshops, parents responded with an average score of 9 out of 10 (N = 19 families), and almost all of the kids wanted to return in the future. In addition to enjoyment, children may also benefit from developing social and cognitive skills such as confidence, collaboration, creativity, and understanding of technology.⁵

The long-term impact of the design collaboration is an ongoing research question we intend to explore through the Cooney Center Sandbox initiative. This will include developing measures to capture potential benefits for the child and adult designers involved as well as the product itself and whether it better aligns with principles of good design. Expanding access to the design experience for children and communities who may not typically be involved is another key goal.

Learn more about the Cooney Center Sandbox.

References

¹Hirsh-Pasek, et al. (2015). Putting education in “educational” apps: Lessons from the science of learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(1), 3-34.

Zosh, et al. (2018). Accessing the inaccessible: Redefining play as a spectrum. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1124.

² Vaala, S., Ly, A., & Levine, M. H. (2015). Getting a Read on the App Stores: A Market Scan and Analysis of Children’s Literacy Apps. Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop.

³ Druin, A. (2002). The role of children in the design of new technology. Behaviour and Information Technology, 21(1), 1-25.

⁴ Fails, J. A., Guha, M. L., & Druin, A. (2013). Methods and techniques for involving children in the design of new technology for children. Foundations and Trends in Human–Computer Interaction, 6(2), 85-166.

⁵ Guha, M. L. (2010). Understanding the social and cognitive experiences of children involved in technology design processes. University of Maryland, College Park.

McNally, B., Mauriello, M. L., Guha, M. L., & Druin, A. (2017, May). Gains from participatory design team membership as perceived by child alumni and their parents. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 5730-5741).

Vikki Katz presents research on digital equity at the Aprendiendo Juntos Council meeting in August 2015.

When I met Michael Levine outside a conference at UPenn in 2012, I had no idea how much that conversation would shape my career. From my earliest visits to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center office, I was struck by the infectious sense of purpose and energy there.

Starting in 2013, I had the good fortune to partner with Michael, Lori Takeuchi, and the JGCC team in a multi-year research project to understand how initiatives to advance digital equity were influencing families’ technology experiences. We set out to investigate how kids and families who were income-qualified for subsidized broadband and digital devices were making decisions about adopting and engaging technology for learning.

With generous support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we began with more than 300 hour-long interviews in Spanish and English, with parents and their elementary school-aged children, in school districts in Arizona, California, and Colorado. The study’s second stage was a survey of lower-income parents about digital inequality and their families’ technology engagement—the first nationally representative effort to investigate these issues among lower-income families. The results were published in 2016 as the Opportunity for All? report (written with Victoria Rideout), and the findings supported the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to expand the Lifeline Program, expanding broadband access for the lowest-income U.S. families, shortly thereafter.

Providing policymakers with the careful evidence they need to materially improve conditions for kids and families was, for me, the best part of working with the JGCC. My time as a Senior Fellow gave me many opportunities to learn from Michael Levine about writing for policymakers at state, federal, and local levels; we wrote a policy brief that was cited by the White House Council of Economic Advisors, editorials translating the study’s findings for educators, and with the creative talents of Catherine Jhee, produced infographics that reached broad audiences.

That early work on digital inequality among lower-income families came, of course, long before the pandemic. We could never have foreseen just how central technology would become to children’s abilities to continue to learn—and, just how cruel being under-connected would be for millions of children in remote instruction. The research for Opportunity for All? uniquely positioned us to investigate pandemic remote learning experiences, which we did in 2021 in partnership with Noggin and New America in the Learning at Home While Under-Connected study. I will always be grateful for my time at the JGCC and for what I learned there about translating research findings for policymakers and educators in order to support them as they support the learning and development of children and families.

A very happy 15th anniversary to the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and all the special people in the family it has created!

Vikki Katz is Professor in the School of Communication at Chapman University (Orange, CA). Until 2022, she was Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). Her research focuses on digital inequality and family technology engagement within immigrant, lower-income, and working-class families and has been supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of NY, Grable Foundation, Noggin, Overdeck Family Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, and Spencer Foundation.

She is Editor of Journal of Children and Media and on the Board of Directors for the National Center for Families Learning and the Advisory Board for the CPB-PBS Ready to Learn Program, which supports development of educational media targeted at preschool and early elementary school-aged children and their families to promote early learning and school readiness.

Allison Mishkin at the Intergenerational STEM video game design workshop at the Kennedy Center, 2015 (Photo: Matt Roth)

I started working at the Cooney Center out of college and grew to be the Research and Program Manager for the National STEM Video Game Challenge—a role that took me from Pittsburgh to the White House. As the Challenge grew, so did I. I was determined to understand how to guarantee positive outcomes from kids’ technology use. After lengthy conversations with my mentors at the Cooney Center, I pursued a dual PhD/MBA between Oxford and Yale focused on technology and child development, with a special emphasis on motivating young women in STEM. I currently lead Google’s Kids and Families product policy team. 

I’m fortunate that the Cooney Center helped me build a life centering young people’s needs, and gave me frameworks I’ve applied throughout my career.

Magic happens when research informs program design, which informs future research. While the concept is embedded in modern product development processes, the Center is unique in bringing Joan Ganz Cooney’s approach to technology development. During my time with the STEM Challenge, I led both the research and the program … which made each of them better. Connecting research and action fueled my PhD research, where I would develop and then evaluate programs for motivating young people, and fuels the current approach I take to policy development.

Magic also happens when you understand the systems that kids sit in. We achieved the biggest successes with the STEM Challenge when we worked directly with schools, cultural institutions, families, and NGOs. The STEM Challenge helped me develop a systems-thinking approach to my work, which I’ve taken to subsequent roles.

Finally, magic happens when you work with great folks. The team I worked with at the Cooney Center included some of the most thoughtful, fun, and mission-driven people with whom I’ve worked, and the JGCC community was a key reason why we achieved great outcomes. I’m grateful to the Cooney Center and to its vibrant community for setting me on my path.

Allison Mishkin has spent her career ensuring young people have fun and delightful digital experiences. She currently leads Google’s Kids and Families Product Policy team. Prior to Google, Allison applied her expertise in technology & child development at organizations including Lego, Nickelodeon, the ESA, and UNICEF. She earned her PhD from the University of Oxford, her MBA from the Yale School of Management, and her BA from the University of Pennsylvania.