Tag Archives: apps

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Call for Applications: Well-Being by Design Fellowship 2025

The Call for Applications is now open through October 11, 2024.  If you follow our work, you may have seen the incredible results produced by our inaugural cohort of Well-Being by Design Fellows.  Building from the success of the first year of this program, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce a second year of the Well-being by Design Fellowship, supported by Pinterest.  We invite applications from mid-career designers of kids’ technology and media who want to prioritize…

Expanding a Child’s Network of Learning Opportunities with Design Squad Maker

Kids had fun using Design Squad Maker, saying they liked “figuring out a problem to solve” and “making something useful with my hands and figuring out how it works and how to fix and make it better.” When science and engineering learning in schools takes a back seat to math and reading, a child’s extended community can fill in the gaps. According to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) elementary school science position statement, “Tapping into the broader scientific community…

Building Tools Parents Want to Use

Parents often quip that children do not “come with instructions.” Underlying this joke is a real interest in supporting their children’s learning and development, but not always knowing how. And parents do need to know how to do their job well—their actions may determine children’s lifelong happiness and success.   In 2018, my team and I started Devie, an AI parenting coach startup, to help parents feel empowered about the decisions they were making and to help provide their children with…

Making the Most of Screen Time During Winter Break

While young children are off school over winter break, many families will be looking for activities to keep kids learning and having fun. On cold winter days, creating art or music together using a touchscreen app is one way for caregivers to connect and support the cognitive and social development of their early learners.  Research on Joint Media Engagement (JME) from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center demonstrates that media can provide important social, emotional, and cognitive experiences for children when…

Engaging Parents in Children’s Digital Learning—Without Charts and Graphs

Like many digital learning products, Sago Mini provides tools to engage parents in their child’s play experience. However, unlike most similar products, you won’t find a single chart, graph, score, or badge that measures your child’s success.  It’s well-established in the industry that while parents often express an interest in having dashboards that track their child’s learning, very few actually use them. With that in mind, it was with some caution that we began to explore the idea for a…

An Interview with Mindy Brooks, UX Director for Google Play & Kids & Family Initiatives

Mindy Brooks is the Director of UX for Google Play, and one of the key masterminds around the creation of a new Kids section that features Teacher Approved apps on Google Play. Her kids and family team focuses on designing technology that meets the needs of families around the world and helps other teams understand developmental principles for families that help drive product design and vision. Mindy is also an alumna of Sesame Workshop, where she was Director of Content…

Small Moments, Big Impact: An App to Promote New Mothers’ Wellbeing

I have been a pediatrician in inner-city Boston for over 45 years. During my residency, I  was trained to diagnose and treat children with acute and chronic medical problems.  Over time, I realized that was not enough to help children be healthy, happy, and do well in school. I learned that the best way I could help children achieve these goals is by helping their parents, and that the best way to reach parents is through their children. An “a-ha”…

Digital Media Can Help Preschoolers Learn Real-World Science Skills

Young children spend about two hours each day using screen-based media, about half of which is spent on educational media, according to their parents. Many studies report that children can learn a range of skills from well-designed educational media. Yet we know relatively little about whether and how well children are able to apply skills they’ve learned from digital media in the real world. This question is particularly important for subjects that involve learning about the physical world, like science.…

We Need Sparks of Insight and Inspiration

Back in 2010, I sat in a small office on Sveavägen in Stockholm, Sweden. It was fall, which in Scandinavia means that it is dark all the time, and rainy most of the time. My colleague Emil Ovemar and I were doing some research for a potential project regarding touchscreen devices. When doing work like this, you tend to start broad and look at anything and everything. Then you start whittling things down, building hypotheses, and finding concepts that seem…

Ruff Family Science: Using Media to Support Multi-Generational Science Learning

Asha and her 6-year-old daughter, Zara, take deep breaths and blow onto the sails of their sail cars. The cars roll away…quickly at first before slowing to a stop. Zara cheers and exclaims, “I won! Mine went farthest!” Asha agrees and asks, “What was your prediction?” Zara reflects and grabs a yardstick, “Well, I thought it would go 16 inches. But it went a lot more.” She measures the distance and proudly announces, “25 inches!” Asha is impressed at the…