The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce the 10 fellows who have joined our inaugural Well-being by Design Fellowship, which is supported by Pinterest and foundry10. The fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 100 talented applicants through a rigorous review process. The organizations that our fellows represent range from small to large companies; all of them share a passion for creating great digital experiences for young people.

The purpose of the fellowship is to promote “well-being by design” as an aspirational and accessible goal for industry professionals. Over the next four months, the fellows will meet regularly as a learning community. They will workshop ideas informed by well-being and child development frameworks and apply them to their work on digital products for kids. The Cooney Center will support the fellows via workshops, consultations with industry experts and young people, and collaborative learning opportunities as they make progress on their respective designs.

As the fellowship concludes, we will publish the fellows’ work in case studies that explain their approach and highlight the new features that will support well-being in their digital products for kids. We also plan to launch an online community to make these ideas available to all who are interested in kids’ media and well-being. Please sign up if you’d like to stay up to date.

Meet our fellows!

 

	Javier Agüera Pandora’s Way Javier is an inventor, social entrepreneur, and co-founder of Pandora’s Way. He is passionate about humane technology design. He will focus on transforming when and how parents give their first devices to their kids, informed by the latest insights from behavioral science, and is committed to designing products in a more human-aligned way.
	Franceli Cibrian Chapman University Franceli is an Assistant Professor at the Dale E. and Sarah Ann Fowler School of Engineering at Chapman University. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), assistive technology, ubiquitous computing, pervasive healthcare, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). She will focus on promoting self-regulation in neurodiverse children using wearables, such as smart watches.
	Grace Collins Snowbright Studio Grace is the Founder/CEO of Snowbright Studio, an award-winning Cleveland-based LGBTQ+ game studio dedicated to publishing heartwarming games and experiences. They will focus on Time Tails: Civics – an upcoming digital interactive adventure game and companion civics curriculum designed to help students learn about and practice civics.
	Taylor Davis iCivics Taylor is the Director of Curriculum and Content at iCivics, managing the Curriculum Team and overseeing the scope, voice, and depth of iCivics curricular resources. She will focus on Private i History Detectives, a collection of inquiry-based units and lessons for elementary students to investigate primary sources and collect evidence to help them draw conclusions and develop claims to historical questions.
	Kimberly Dowd Google Kimberly, a Senior UX Researcher at Google, is committed to global research and building equitable products. Her focus is on delivering helpful, equitable experiences for young people and families using Google Search, whose mission is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.
	Melissa Gedney PBS KIDS Melissa is the Senior Manager of the Learn Together Project at PBS KIDS, supporting co-design of content and experiences to foster intergenerational moments between kids and their grown-ups. She will focus on workshopping and identifying ways to integrate curated family- and educator-facing resources alongside kids’ products that add value and play to their media experience.
	Carissa Kang Roblox Carissa is a Principal User Researcher at Roblox, leading research on helping teens connect and communicate with friends and finding like-minded communities. She will focus on ways to promote healthy socialization and to provide teens with more control and options over their experience. The ultimate goal is to foster more engaging and rich communication experiences, while considering teens’ needs.
	Olivia Levenson Korchagin Global Tinker Olivia co-founded Global Tinker, a multi award-winning children’s media company harnessing the power of stories, constructionist pedagogy, and ubiquitous technology to inspire kids to create more and consume less. She will focus on “Breathe, Make, & Flourish,” a multidisciplinary mental health platform designed for caretakers to help foster resilience in preschoolers who have endured traumatic experiences.
	Aatash Parikh Inkwire Aatash launched Inkwire, a project-based learning and digital portfolio platform for schools, used by tens of thousands of students. He will focus on a new AI-powered curriculum design tool to help teachers design projects that are both engaging for their students as well as cover academic standards, with the goal of reigniting young people’s sense of purpose and excitement for learning.
	Keeana Saxon Kidogo Productions As the Founder and CEO of Kidogo Productions, Inc., a digital media company for kids, Keeana promotes Black Joy and Excellence through videos, games, and live events. She is building Kidogo’s first app, which will allow Kidogo Kids to stream videos and play games, connecting passive content to interactive content.

As the United States enters a national election cycle, concerned experts and educators are calling for a renewed emphasis on civic education. We’re witnessing intense political polarization; it seems more urgent now than ever before to find civic values that unite our fellow citizens.  For older generations, educational media such as the iconic Schoolhouse Rock!, which is currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, or Nick News’ Kids Pick the President series were important resources for learning about civics and democratic values. Who among us cannot recite parts of the song “I’m Just a Bill”?

Earlier this fall, a “Schoolhouse Rock” for the modern age called “Well Versed” launched at an exciting event at Independence Hall with two lifelong educators: first ladies Laura Bush and Dr. Jill Biden. The series was produced by Nickelodeon, Noggin and the social media production studio ATTN, with key advice and curriculum support from iCivics. Joining the event was a class of fourth graders from a local Philadelphia school. As the event started, the students were humming the tunes and swinging to the music, totally engaged. The catchiness of the music is what folks still remember from Schoolhouse Rock!. That is exactly what Well Versed seeks to achieve: to engage a new generation of young students with civic learning in order to build the foundation for civic preparation and participation.

The learning goals for Well Versed and iCivics are certainly ambitious: to advance the civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions of young people so that we can heal our divisions and rebuild a healthy democracy all while advancing national standards that define what kids must know and be able to do, including knowledge of history, civic discourse and socialization. This is especially important because even iconic media series such as Schoolhouse Rock! are inadequate on their own in preparing students to retain and apply their new knowledge in action. For example, while this study has found that children can learn the words of the preamble to the Constitution, it has been suggested that they may still fail to transfer their understanding to real-life contexts without additional instruction. That is why our organizations are teaming up – ones that usually focus on kids learning separately inside and outside of school – to advance civic education in many youth spaces. Our bet is that anytime, anywhere engagement with civic education is essential as we enter a critical moment in this national experiment in democracy.

The founder of iCivics, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who passed away Dec. 1 at the age of 93, saw very early on how essential it is to invest in the development of our youngest citizens.

Justice O’Connor founded iCivics in 2009 to help close the gap between the civics of her youth – boring and didactic – and the civic learning that students need today to be civically engaged. Since then, iCivics is now used by 9 million students every year. Mostly known for their game-infused curriculum, iCivics now offers a full suite of curricular products. Their theory of change relies on teaching civic learning in a way that is engaging and sticky.

Making Civics Stick

Imagine a three-year-old chanting, “It’s not fair,” while marching around the living room wearing pants on her head. Picture a first-grader who is curious as to why there is so much road construction between his house and Grandma’s. Think of a tween whose planning of a pool party runs smack into competing priorities and new rules of conduct. These kids are already experiencing the concepts of justice, freedom, authority, compromise, and conflict on a daily basis. Might this be a good time to deliver a little foundational content to help them on their way?

Our teams created Well Versed for kids ages 4 to 12 who are young, but not inexperienced in the big ideas of civic life and learning. Each music video blends earwormy music, civics concepts, and our target audience’s natural curiosity about how the world around them works. We’ve pulled together a talented team of experts in civics and early childhood education, lyricists, musicians, and animators to deliver something educational that doesn’t feel like it. We selected civic topics that speak to the skills and knowledge for which kids are ready. The first four videos are for preschoolers, and focus on rules, differences, disagreements, and doing your part. The remaining eight videos are for elementary school students and cover everything from local government to our rights. Each video, performed by a team of talented youth, is supported by a viewing guide with short activities and conversation starters that can be used at home, in the classroom, or beyond.

The series takes kids through all kinds of fun scenarios:

• Ava and Johnny lend their hands to friends and neighbors in Do Your Part.
• We take the Three Branches to the basketball court.
• Max gets schooled on the Functions of Government by Jade… and some flossing Founders.
• An egg salad (!) teaches kids about the power of participation in Our Voices.

As a media and educational team, we recommend the production model used to develop the series, drawing on the expertise of civics educators, the creative power of songwriters and animators, and the distribution power of broadcasters and national teaching platforms. As our partners prepare for the wide use of Well Versed during the coming election year and beyond, we hope that this formula, first introduced by Joan Ganz Cooney in the design of Sesame Street, will become one that leaders use to create content to address other vital issues such as communicating to kids about climate change and supporting their emotional health. Working together, we can help raise our democracy as a strong and shining model for the world!

 

Louise Dube is CEO of iCivics. Carrie Ray-Hill is the Senior Director of Digital Learning at iCivics.  Michael H Levine, the Founding Executive Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, is Senior Vice President for Learning and Impact at Noggin/Paramount.