Category Archives: Industry

It’s August—which means it’s SXSW PanelPicker time! We are looking forward to sharing ideas and learning together with friends and colleagues in Austin in March 2023. The SXSW panel selection process relies on input from the community, and we’ve got a PanelPicker proposal we’re incredibly excited to share. To vote, please visit panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote before Sunday, August 21st and log in or create a free account. It’s super easy! You can find our proposal here. Designing Tech for Children’s Well-Being There…

Conducting playtesting with kids can be tricky. It can be challenging to get feedback from children that can really help producers make great products—but it’s definitely not impossible. We are thrilled to share Playtest with Kids, a new digital toolkit that shares best practices gathered from dozens of kids researchers. “Do you like this?” seems like a very reasonable question to ask children. But we’ve noticed that asking this seemingly-straightforward question will often result in an immediate “yes!” —not because…

Public media is at a critical junction. Rapidly evolving technology ecosystems mean that new platforms, modes of engagement, and forms of content are driving every part of the media sector to innovate. At the same time, tweens and teens who are growing up in this new world are approaching media differently — they aren’t just consuming media, they’re engaging with it creatively, interactively, and socially too. In the current environment, tweens and teens rarely have trustworthy, high-quality options available to…

This post originally appeared on the Digital Futures Commission website and appears here with permission. Like everything else in their life, children’s play has shifted online almost by default due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Parents, teachers and professionals who work with children, on the other hand, have scrambled to advise children on play with digital technologies; resources have been hard to come by, making it hard to figure out what free play in digital contexts looks like! So, what are the…

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.” –Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019) Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices,…

When the Cooney Center published D is for Digital over 10 years ago, our goal was to insert the positive potential of kids media into the national conversation around children’s learning. One thing I can say with certainty is that we never imagined that a global pandemic would push digital media into the forefront of that conversation. Yet, here we are. This sudden insurgence of demand for informal educational technology (by that I mean educational technology products for the home,…

This past November 7 and 8, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Center for Science and the Imagination and the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University, and Dubit convened about 60 field leaders at the inaugural Future of Childhood Salon on Immersive Media and Child Development. As salon participants, these leaders in education, research, pediatric medicine, technology policy, content creation, hardware development, and more began thinking about the opportunities and risks of immersive media (i.e.,…

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity.  Carissa Christner: Today I’m very excited to bring to you an interview with Caroline Ingeborn of Toca Boca. Toco Boca makes the very best play apps that I have seen anywhere, and if you have been playing apps with your children and you haven’t heard of Toca Boca I’d be very surprised. I think the last time I checked out the top 10 paid apps…

In May, Maayan Eldar and Ashley Mannetta discussed Me: A Kid’s Diary by Tinybop at the International Communication Association Conference in Prague. The app encourages empathy and self-reflection by inviting children to respond to a series of questions about themselves and their lives with drawings, photos, texts, or recordings. We invited them to tell us more how user-testing influences the design of an app, and what the data they have begun to analyze reveals.   Last year, Tinybop launched an app…

This partial transcript of the App Fairy podcast has been edited for length and clarity. Visit appfairy.org for more information about Tinybop. Carissa Christner: Hello and welcome to the App Fairy podcast! Today we’re going to be talking with the makers of Tinybop. These guys make great apps for school-age kids, a slightly older audience than some of the other app makers that I’ve spoken with. For this episode, we’re going to try something a little bit different. About a year ago I was…