Tag Archives: education

This post originally appeared on Common Sense Education and appears here with permission.   Watch a group of preschoolers working in a garden. It’s cute, right? But it turns out they’re learning more than you’d think. According to our new NSF-funded report, STEM Starts Early, co-published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and New America, there’s growing evidence that very young children from all backgrounds — even children from birth to age 8 — learn important science, technology, engineering, and math…

In 2013, 25 per cent of public school children in the U.S. were Hispanic-Latino, and this number is expected to grow to 29 per cent by 2025. Within this vibrant and diverse population, many students, particularly those from immigrant families, face challenges in school. Many are tasked with mastering a new language, and their parents often struggle to understand an education system that is completely new to them. But Hispanic-Latino families can bring enormous strengths to school communities. How can educators…

Imagine you were playing a game of Trivial Pursuit and this was your question: What institution has the largest collection of primary sources in the world, a board game on human morality, and now a video game expert? Answer: The Library of Congress Trivial Pursuit was just one of the games featured in our August 1, 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge teacher workshop co-sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. In the event hosted at the Library of Congress, a group of DC-area teachers explored…

What does László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian artist active during the early 1900s, have to do with video game design? The National STEM Video Game Challenge and the Guggenheim Museum’s art education team partnered up last month to host a workshop that explored ways to apply Moholy-Nagy’s artistic process to the practice of game development. In preparation for the workshop, the STEM Challenge team visited the museum to tour the current exhibition, Moholy-Nagy: Future Present. Working with the educators at the…

Steve Isaacs teaches video game design and development to middle school students in New Jersey, and has been recognized as an ISTE Outstanding Teacher this year. Here he shares his experience in developing a curriculum in game design at his school, and offers tips for educators interested in doing so at their own schools.   When I started teaching at William Annin Middle School (WAMS) in 1998, I offered an after school computer club that focused on Game Design and…

In many ways, the audience for PEEP and the Big Wide World is what you might expect. Every day, thousands of preschoolers, parents, and educators log on to this award-winning public media project to explore math and science—by watching videos, playing games, and finding hands-on activities they can explore in their own homes and neighborhoods. But PEEP’s audience is unique in one important way: more than 20% of PEEP’s users are Spanish-speaking. This wasn’t always the case. The growth of…

Remarks of Chairman Tom Wheeler at “Digital Equity: Technology and Learning in the Lives of Lower-Income Families” On February 3, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Rutgers University co-hosted a forum at New America in Washington, D.C. We released Opportunity for All?: Technology and Learning in Lower-Income Families  with presentations by authors Victoria Rideout and Vikki S. Katz, and a series of conversations around the issues of digital equity and access to broadband, with a focus on families with school-age…

Televisions, touchscreens, and smartphones are now almost ubiquitous in homes. Many young children are watching, listening to, or interacting with two to three hours of screen media per day. In the latest installment of the Ideas Lunch series at the Governance Lab, a Brooklyn-based action research lab focused on the use of new technology to govern better, the Cooney Center’s Michael Levine explained that rather than portending the death of reading, devices, apps, and tools can help children learn by…

A Collaborative Experiment On January 23, 2015, researchers, educators, and digital media professionals spent the day at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the d.school) to imagine how to better support the needs and interest-driven learning of families with children through digital media. The “Designing Media for Underserved Families” event, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Cyberlearning and Future Learning Technologies program, continued in the cross-sector collaborative spirit of the LIFE Center and the Families and Media consortium, in…

Games in Education is a multi-day symposium which focuses on the topic of using video games to supplement and inspire in-classroom education. Participants span early childhood through post secondary educators in New York’s Capital District and surrounding regions who are interested in finding ways to use video games and related technology to enrich and inspire interest by students in core curriculum topics. The symposium has run annually since 2007 and is free for educators to attend. For more information, visit…