Category Archives: Guest Posts

Back in 2010, Motion Math was a finalist in the first Cooney Center Prizes for Mobile Learning. They’ve continued to make some amazing apps since then, including Motion Math Zoom, Motion Math: Hungry Fish, and more.  CEO and co-founder Jacob Klein shares some of the inspiration behind the creation of their latest app, Questimate!, a game that makes estimation fun. Our new estimation game Questimate! came out a couple weeks ago. It’s the first game where players make their own…

Girls should play more video games. That’s one of the unexpected lessons I take away from a rash of recent studies on the importance of—and the malleability of—spatial skills. First, why spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements, according to research published this month in the journal Psychological Science. The long-term study found that 13-year-olds’ scores on traditional…

On Tuesday, June 4, the Center on Media and Human Development Northwestern University released Parenting in a Digital Age: A National Survey. Alexis Lauricella, one of the report’s co-authors, shares some of the findings here.

In the last few years, I’ve worked with a lot of teachers using mobile devices in the classroom. The first week is always exciting – “There are SO many apps to choose from!” Yet, two weeks later, teachers’ attitudes have shifted from optimistic to overwhelmed. “There are SO many apps to choose from—how will I figure out which ones are actually good? And how on Earth am I going to figure out how to use them all effectively?!” The educational…

What if algebra were more addictive than Angry Birds? Imagine an eight-year old mastering algebra on an iPad by sorting dragons into boxes. Or, what if middle schoolers could become proficient with fractions by playing a platform game similar to Super Mario Bros? How about if the doorway to mastering Newtonian physics involved ninth graders and digital levers? Now, what if a video game could both teach students to argue a point in an essay, read Great Books closely for…

The topic of kids and technology is a hot topic again. This would normally be a good thing, if the questions that are being discussed weren’t fundamentally the wrong ones. It is, however, a familiar situation. We are going through a normalization of a new technology, and it will be met in the same way that technology has been met before: with skepticism, doubt and the occasional hint of technophobia. Discussions like these cloud the interesting part—the choices that parents…

Last December, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the results of its two-year review of the Children’s Online Privacy Protections Act (COPPA), including a series of amendments and rule changes aimed at updating the Act in light of recent technological and social developments. This was the first time COPPA had been revised since it was first introduced in 1998, and given all the new devices, industry practices and trends in children’s online behaviour (including social networking) that have emerged over…

Scratch makes it easy to create games using programming blocks that snap together, in the spirit of LEGO bricks. You can customize your Scratch projects by drawing or importing your own images and sounds. Since Scratch was released in 2007, more than a million kids (age 8 and up) have used it to create games, animations, simulations, and many other kinds of programs. Here are a few examples of cool games that young people have created with Scratch — including…

Today we are living in a world where our lives are being shaped in fundamental ways by the products of science and their application in technology. For millions of youth, videogames are a big part of some of their earliest and up-close encounters with advanced technologies that incorporate computer simulations, visualization, communication, and digital art among other things. Playing videogames is gaining increased recognition as a valuable educational activity both within formal (in-school), and informal (out-of-school) settings. Research studies have…

Over the past decade, the steady increase in the accessibility of the Internet has put new technologies at the fingertips of many. This evolving platform presents a niche for the development of digital literacy and a growing market for information technologies. With deep commitment to a mission serving the youth who need us most, my team and I at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington (BGCGW) take on the responsibility of ensuring that every member who comes through…