Tag Archives: coviewing

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…

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…

Finn Caspian is a human boy living in outer space.  He and his friends (both human and robot) have lots of incredible adventures across the galaxy in this serially-told podcast, but the big personality of the robot co-host steals the show. The show also has brilliant ways of incorporating listeners’ participation in the production through listener-submitted jokes, art, and sound clips. Carissa Christner: Where do you make your recordings? (at home? in a studio?) Jonathan Messinger: For Finn Caspian I do…

When we first encountered The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel, I was a little nervous about sharing it with my 7-year-old since the recommended age range is 9-12.  The storyline and music score do make this story the most intense of any that we listen to, but my 7-year-old couldn’t get enough.  He binge-listened to the first half of the season and then was on the edge of his seat waiting for each new installment to come out.  If your child…

If you were born after 1990, are the parent or grandparent of someone born after 1990, or a children’s media producer of any age, Ready To Learn (RTL) has probably touched your life. Launched in 1994, RTL is a U.S. Department of Education-funded initiative that provides about $25 million annually for the creation of educational media (TV, computer games, apps, and more) designed to promote school readiness. RTL funding has gone to the production of legacy media properties that existed…

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…

Once a novelty restricted to arcades, video games have become a deeply embedded part of our lives. As digital game platforms have become increasingly more affordable and more accessible over the past forty years, it has become clear that games aren’t just fun to play, but can motivate people of all ages to learn more deeply and to improve productivity. As part of our Families and Media Project, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center conducted a survey of nearly 700 parents…

The entries are in for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, and our expert judges have been busy playing video games! This year we’ve received more than 4,000 entries in the following categories: Gamestar Mechanic, Gamemaker, Scratch, Unity, Open Platforms, and Written Design Documents. The STEM Challenge has hosted more than 35 game design workshops across the country for youth and educators. The energy at these workshops was amazing—read more about a youth workshop that took place at the Science…

On Saturday, May 9, 17 kids between 8-18 years old joined a 50+ adult in their life (parents, grandparents, relatives, or friends) for a free, three-hour video game design workshop at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. hosted by AARP and MentorUp, E-Line Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.  Allison Mishkin of the Cooney Center, and Mark German of E-Line Media led the pairs throughout a workshop to discover the elements that make up any game…