Tag Archives: andy russell

Here at the Cooney Center, we often talk about the importance of multi-disciplinary collaboration, and I love it when talented people from different sectors of the industry get together and do something great.  Last week, brilliant app developer Andy Russell of Launchpad Toys joined forces with one of my favorite kids-tech writers, Dan Donahoo of WIRED’s GeekDad blog, on what I think is an extremely important initiative.  The pair has released the Children’s App Manifesto, which was unveiled via this…

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…

The leaves are changing, the air is getting crisp… and your teeth are hurting just LOOKING at all the candy stacked up in the grocery aisles. Yes, it’s October and Halloween is just around the corner! To celebrate this most playfully creative holiday, we’re very excited to announce that the Cooney Center is partnering with Mobile Learning Finalist Launchpad Toys to create a Spooky Story Contest for kids and parents to create and share their favorite Ghost Stories and Terrifying…

Looking for a creative way to engage young students with their summer reading? How about encouraging them to re-tell that story themselves via Toontastic, an iPad app that makes it easy to create and share cartoons? The Toontastic team wants to encourage summer readers to share their favorites, and have even lowered the price of the app to just 99 cents for the next three weeks! Andy Russell shares the scoop:   Ah Summer Break… a magical but all-too fleeting…

Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture…

In our last post we described how theories of creativity and learning should be integrated with creative problem solving approaches to address our nation’s creativity crisis. Recent advances in technology are enabling creators of children’s digital media to design more experiences that foster children’s creativity and learning. Although children’s digital media producers are beginning to create products for children that are marketed as creative tools, there is still a lack of mechanisms that have fully captured the type of open-ended,…

In our first post, we provided an overview of Newsweek’s coverage of America’s creativity crisis, which highlighted the crucial need for creativity and innovation in solving real-world problems. We began to explore skills and processes that have been associated with creativity and appreciate how your comments added to the discussion. In this post, we’ll discuss specific learning and creativity theories that provide a foundation for designing media that fosters children’s creativity. Divergent thinking is our cognitive ability to think outside…