Category Archives: Guest Posts

This past spring, TIFF Nexus hosted a series of conferences and creative jams to explore new ways of creating media in Toronto, in which our own Carly Shuler participated. We invited Jam Leader Mark Rabo to tell us more about what sets TIFF Nexus apart from other conferences about youth and media. TIFF is known primarily by its unabbreviated namesake, the Toronto International Film Festival, which attracts a worldwide audience and fills the city with stars and star-gazers for two…

Dr. Idit Harel Caperton, President and Founder of the World Wide Workshop, is passionate about getting more young girls and women excited about becoming leaders in STEM-related fields.This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is reprinted here with permission. This is the second of two posts about integrating more women in the gaming industry: read the first post here. In this piece, she focuses on how to get girls and young women the support they need to dive into…

In January, we introduced Cooney Center Research Associate Cynthia Chiong’s new website, A Matter of App, in which she rates educational apps for children. Fifty reviews later, she shares what she has learned along the way.   THE BIG 5-0. Fifty reviews, that is. Woo-hoo! This has been quite a learning process for me. I started out with the goal of seeing what’s out there in the app world for kids, and I must admit that my goal has shifted a bit…

 This post was originally submitted to Edutopia and is reprinted with their permission. Mixed reactions to children’s e-books and the digitization of story time The news media and blogosphere were abuzz last month with the news that Apple is “reinventing the textbook” through the introduction of digital textbooks available for the iPad. With the announcement has come a myriad of opinions and speculations regarding the possible repercussions of Apple’s textbook reinvention for schools and for children’s learning.Many celebrate the availability of…

For the second year in a row, the iPad is the most popular item that children are asking for as a holiday gift.  Given that it is the season for making wish-lists, it is in this spirit that I offer my own iPad research wish-list for 2012. The items on this list will surely keep a variety of researchers busy in the new year and would help address some critical questions about the iPad in particular, but touch screens in…

The developer’s prize for the first National STEM Video Game Challenge went to Filament Games, headed by Dan White and Dan Norton, for You Make Me Sick, a game in which students design a bacteria or virus and attempt to infect a target host. Creative Director Dan Norton writes in with an update and shares some tips for aspiring game designers interested in entering this year’s National STEM Video Game Challenge.   Hi everyone! I’m Dan Norton, Creative Director at…

Dan Caldwell was a finalist in the 2011 National STEM Video Game Challenge who inspired the creation of the Educator Prize. Participating in the first National STEM Video Game Challenge has opened amazing doors for me, most importantly the opportunity to work full-time on my sciTunes Education Products Inc. curriculum.  I have also had the pleasure to meet with a number of incredible people who have shared great insights with me, and I hope to continue to build and develop…

This post originally appeared in TASC’s “The ExpandED Exchange” blog. Read more to find out what our New York Action Team members have been up to! Wouldn’t you love to be a kid in one of these two new pilot after-school programs at Quest to Learn, a tech-powered public middle school in New York City? The program in green design grew out of seventh graders’ desire to invent more sustainable ways to live on this planet. The school’s multi-media news…

Two weeks ago, this blog featured a preview of Robot Heart Stories (R<3S), a 10-day transmedia learning project in which two classrooms in underserved neighborhoods in Montreal (French speaking) and Los Angeles (English speaking) used collaboration and creative problem solving to help a lost robot navigate across North America before hitching a ride back to space with NASA on a launch to the International Space Station, scheduled sometime early next year. The robot (symbolized by a stuffed animal version embedded…

Picture for a second the first thing you ever constructed, designed, prototyped, or invented. If you’re like most of us, there’s a pretty good chance that you built your idea using toys like LEGOs, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, or perhaps, to your parents’ dismay, a mix of all of the above (good luck getting Play-Doh out of those bricks). Over the years, magazines like MAKE have featured lots of DIY toy projects, but very few talk about designing for Creative Play…