Tag Archives: app

Educators and researchers have long argued that engaging families and making connections between home and school learning are key elements that foster children’s academic success and strong communities. In communities where parents may have had few educational opportunities themselves, or may have been educated in very different systems outside the U.S, it is especially important to build a common understanding and empower families. To help address this need, Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD) in Chula Vista, the largest K-6…

As a parent of a 4-year-old, I know that mobile apps are a) incredibly popular with preschoolers and b) that getting my daughter to brush her teeth twice a day is HARD.  In my professional role as VP of Digital at The Ad Council, I recently had the opportunity to work on developing Toothsavers, a mobile app for our Children’s Oral Health campaign. The challenge for this campaign was to motivate parents to take action to reduce their children’s risk…

How does one know that an educational experience is actually helping students learn? Our company Motion Math makes educations games for the iPad and iPhone that let kids play with numbers. It’s easy for us to think, as we’re making our apps, and watching students play them, to believe that learning is happening, especially because we spend a lot of time ensuring that our designs follow good pedagogical and usability principles. However, the history of educational technology is littered with many false promises and disappointing results, most recently given an overview by Matt Richtel of The New York Times. For these reasons, and for our own self-understanding, it’s important that we sometimes hold our learning technologies up to scientific scrutiny.

The Cooney Center is thrilled to announce our newest report! A mobile media revolution that is changing the lives of adults, and now children of all ages, is under way across the globe. This report focuses on how new forms of digital media are influencing very young children and their families in the United States and how we can deploy smart mobile devices and applications-apps, for short-in particular, to help advance their education. Get more information and download report

Today we bring you the first in a series of STEM related blog posts — starting with last year’s Cooney Center Prize finalists for the Motion Math — Gabriel Adauto and Jacob Klein. Throughout the process of creating Motion Math, our bouncing star fraction game for the iPhone and iPad, we’ve greatly benefited from conversations with our primary users: kids. The game was just released, and you can buy it here. We were honored this past June to be a…

iPhone Game Makes Math Physical — Tilt gameplay gives learners an intuitive sense of fractions Motion Math, the pioneer of movement based learning games, today announces the launch of their fractions game which will help students master mathematics. Fractions are a notoriously difficult area of math for many learners. One half, 1/2, .5, and 50 percent all refer to the same amount, but to many students learning fractions, theyʼre only equally bewildering. Research has shown both that fractions are crucial…