Category Archives: Games and Learning

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of a new series on games and learning on MindShift.  Over the next few months, the series will tackle key principles behind games and learning. Primarily intended for teachers, this guide will provide practical and hands-on suggestions for using games in the classroom. This is what MindShift’s Tina Barseghian has to say about the project: How can games unlock a rich world of learning? This is the big question at the heart of the growing…

Are you a K-8 teacher who lives and teaches in the United States? If so, you are eligible to participate in a Joan Ganz Cooney Center survey about using digital media—including games—in the classroom. Teachers who complete this 15-minute survey will receive no payment, but will instead have the chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Researchers at the Cooney Center are also interested in speaking with K-8 teachers about their use of digital media in the classroom. If…

The Games for Change Festival starts bright and early tomorrow morning in New York City, where game designers, investors, journalists, and researchers will gather for a four-day investigation of the current state of serious gaming. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be there, hoping to engage with a community who we believe possesses a cultural connection to the young learners of today. Earlier this month, another game-focused meeting of minds took place in New York, albeit in a more intimate setting and…

At LEGup (the London Educational Games meet up) we recently hosted an event on gamification and its potential to improve educational outcomes in the classroom. Gamification is something of a hot potato at LEGup – many of our members dismiss it out of hand as nothing more than the “pointsification” of educational products in a desperate attempt to make them more engaging. Increasingly though, others are taking a more nuanced view of gamification, looking at it as a method or…

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…

This post originally appeared on gamesandlearning.org.   Toca Boca has emerged as one of the most significant kids producer in the mobile app space. The Swedish-based company has about two dozen apps that have been downloaded 65 million times — and those are paid downloads. The company has found a sweet spot building consumer-facing apps for children that can be sold across the world. Despite their prowess in the App Store, the company is not eyeing the American school market.…

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…

The poets of the early eighteenth century saw it as clearly as we do: “slugs, snails and puppy dog tails” delight all kids equally. But on International Womens’ Day 300 years later, despite all our advancements, “sugar and spice and everything nice” persists as our overwhelming message to girls—and the cumulative effect is anything but advanced. From toddlerhood, girls are inundated by messages that “princesses” are either not cut out for math and science or not welcome in it. A…

There are research reports that highlight the efficacy of games as assessment tools, studies that show certain games can help students suffering from dyslexia and market analyses of the projected overseas learning games market. But how much of this research actually makes it into games you find in the App Store remains a mystery.

Ever since the Joan Ganz Cooney Center opened its doors in 2007, we’ve met a lot of great developers who are producing games for kids. And one piece of advice that they are all looking for is how to get their products funded and distributed as widely as possible– whether the K-12 institutional system, or the App Store. We’ve been listening, and we want to help. Two years ago, with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we convened…