Category Archives: Guest Posts

  The STEM Starts Early report talks about learning trajectories in early STEM. What are they? What difference do they make? What Are Learning Trajectories? Children follow natural developmental progressions in learning and development. As a simple example, they learn to crawl, then walk, then run, skip, and jump with increasing speed and dexterity. These are the levels in the development of movement. They follow natural developmental progressions in learning STEM content, too, learning ideas and skills in their own…

I’m so excited to bring you this interview with Sago Mini!  I’ve been a huge fan of their work since the early days of kids apps and after a chance to visit their offices in Toronto in the fall of 2015, I became even more impressed with the level of dedication they put into creating high-quality apps for the very youngest users. I love how they create “digital toys” that focus on pure play rather than insisting that all of…

On July 6, 2016, Niantic, Inc. released Pokémon GO, which quickly became one of the most popular mobile game apps in history. In this location-based mobile game, players use the GPS capabilities of their smartphones or tablets to navigate an avatar within a virtual world that is overlaid on top of the real world. As players move about in the real world, their avatar moves through the game world, and they can locate, capture, battle, and train virtual monsters called Pokémon—with names…

This was originally published March 21, 2017 on the TEC Center blog and appears here with permission. Katie Paciga, a Fred Rogers Center and TEC Center Early Career Research Fellow, and Mary Quest, a doctoral student and instructor at Erikson Institute, recently published a study on e-book reading with young children. The full citation of the research article is included below and is available for download here. Here, they share several research-based tips to consider as you plan for e-reading…

Watch a group of young children in a community garden. They’ll dig in the soil, find and play with earthworms and insects, plant seeds in patches of sunlight, and come back to watch them sprout, grow, and bear fruit. With a little help, these kids can be doing more than simply playing in the dirt. They can be learning the beginnings of environmental science and plant biology and practicing critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Working alongside teachers trained in early STEM…

When I was a kid, one of my favorite parts of the week was the recurring Friday night game session at my house. It usually consisted of my dad stoking the fire, my sister watching TV, and my mom and me embroiled in a fierce competition of Chinese Checkers or Othello. There may have been times I fumed while resetting the board pieces (I was not a good loser), but I always enjoyed those game nights and still hold onto those…

Across the children’s media landscape, from movies to video games, diversity and inclusion have been hot topics for discussion throughout 2016. Much of the conversation has focused on the finished product, such as an app or toy and whether it does an effective job in reflecting the diversity of the world we live in. Looking at the finished product is without a doubt important, but at Diversity in Apps (DIA), we are also nudging the conversation towards a focus on…

Last week, Sandhya Nankani wrote about the White House Conference on gender and diversity in toys. Here she describes the toy industry’s efforts to break down existing stereotypes and create new narratives that empower girls.   The toy world is abuzz with the recent launch of the newest Barbie doll, modeled after Misty Copeland, the first black female principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. The doll is a part of Barbie’s Sheroes collection, which celebrates female heroes who “like…

Said Joan Ganz Cooney: “Without research, there would be no Sesame Street.” I can say the same about my company, Peekapak. We’ve spoken to over 300 teachers to create Peekapak, a social-emotional learning program for teachers and parents … but, as you can imagine, that takes considerable time, and while we love speaking to educators, we only have so many hours in a day. What’s encouraging for entrepreneurs like myself is that organizations like the Joan Ganz Cooney Center conduct…

We recently released Getting a Read on the App Stores: A Market Scan and Analysis of Children’s Literacy Apps, in which we discuss the challenges facing parents and educators who are looking for quality literacy apps for young children. We invited our colleagues at Common Sense Media—whom we cite as an expert source of reliable app reviews for parents—to tell us more about Graphite, which aims to help educators find high quality apps for students by criteria such as platform,…