Category Archives: Conferences and Community Events

Today, President Obama is hosting the White House Summit on Early Childhood Education, with a coalition of philanthropic, business, education, advocates, and elected officials committed to expanding access to high-quality early education. The Cooney Center’s Founding Director Michael Levine will deliver remarks on Equity and Excellence in the Earliest Years at a panel hosted by Megan Smith, Chief Technology Officer of the United States and Shannon Rudisill, Director of the Office of Child Care. He will be joined by Jim…

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center needs your vote for the SXSW Interactive 2015 conference! We have pulled together heavy hitters from LEGO, Nickelodeon, and MIT Media Lab to talk about how the engaging power of games can be used to promote playful learning. The design experts will share lessons learned from applying the latest research to produce transformative AND popular games. Vote for our panel if you want to hear their best practices for such integral processes like research gathering,…

This spring, I was given an extremely exciting opportunity when the Fred Rogers Center named me an Early Career Fellow. The mission of the Fred Rogers Center is to advance the fields of early learning and children’s media by acting as a catalyst for communication, collaboration, and creative change. This mission complements the work I’ve been doing at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which also focuses on advancing children’s learning through digital media. Here at the Cooney Center, I’ve done…

Are we living in a fantasy? Of the 70 or so panels, celebrations, play tests, and keynotes that took place last month at the 11th Annual Games for Change Festival in New York, nearly all made some mention of the potential for educational games. So what’s with all the hype? Why games and why now? As the Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael Levine put it in his speech on the last day of the festival, “In the face of global…

Thanks to some fairly frequent conference travel over the past few years, my understanding of what makes up “the world of kids, media, and technology” is constantly expanding and changing.  I consider myself incredibly privileged to have the vantage point that comes from traversing many difference academic- and industry-focused circles (just to name one way of slicing up this universe). This past week I attended CHI 2014 (the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), where the “academic…

A few weeks ago, the Cooney Center’s own Lori Takeuchi made the long journey out to Billund, Denmark to participate in the LEGO Foundation’s 2014 Idea Conference. The slideshow below documents the two-and-a-half days she spent dreaming, debating, planning, and (perhaps most importantly) playing with thought leaders from around the world to “re-define play and re-imagine learning.” Photos and captions by Lori Takeuchi. (Note: This slideshow is best viewed directly on Google+) View the photos on Google+

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Lori Takeuchi and Briana Pressey had the wonderful opportunity to be on a panel at the American Education Research Association 2014 (AERA 2014) annual conference in Philadelphia, PA. This panel was titled, “Learning With Technology: Different Perspectives From Low-Income Families” and held under the Special Interest Group – Advanced Technologies for Learning. Lori and Briana began the panel with their talk, “The Impacts of Technology on Family Life: Engaging With Media Together, Apart, and On…

This year, I had the great privilege to attend the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, where I had organized a panel called “Creating Youth Builders – Promoting a New Game Design Ecosystem to Engage Hard-to-Reach Youth in Learning.” The heavy hitters on the panel included Jennifer Groff, a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and the VP of Learning for the Learning Games Network, Ricarose Roque, a PhD student with the Scratch Team at the MIT…

We’re thrilled to be working with our good friends at Games for Change this year as a content partner for the 11th annual Games for Change Festival. We’re particularly proud of the two panels that we’ve curated for Thursday, April 24, featuring some incredible speakers highlighting the innovative work that they are producing. In our first panel, Remaking Learning: Live from Pittsburgh, we’ll discuss some of the exciting activities that are taking place among the gamers, technologists, artists, teachers, and…

This year the Cooney Center attended SXSWedu in full force, with three separate opportunities to share our work on how teachers, researchers, game developers, and investors are bringing true games-based learning to K-12 classrooms.  After presenting with Allisyn Levy of BrainPOP and Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow on Monday, I was able to relax and enjoy the rest of conference, including Michael Levine’s Digital Playground talk on Tuesday and the Games & Learning Publishing Council session later that afternoon. Here…