Tag Archives: empathy

Before the Future of Childhood: Immersive Media and Child Development salon took place in November 2018, we invited experts to share their visions about the ways VR and AR might impact childhood 10 years from now. Chris Chin, Executive Director of VR Content at HTC Vive, believes VR has the potential to play a positive role in building pathways for more equitable learning opportunities.   From Ready Player One to The Matrix, authors, futurists, and Hollywood have painted a picture…

The stories that have emerged from the STEM School Highlands Ranch and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte shootings over the past few weeks have been heartbreaking. There is the story of sixth grader Nate Holley, who put his hand on a metal baseball bat, “just in case … ‘cuz I was gonna go down fighting if I was gonna go down.” There is the tragic heroism of Riley Howell at UNC-Charlotte, who was shot three times while tackling…

In May, Maayan Eldar and Ashley Mannetta discussed Me: A Kid’s Diary by Tinybop at the International Communication Association Conference in Prague. The app encourages empathy and self-reflection by inviting children to respond to a series of questions about themselves and their lives with drawings, photos, texts, or recordings. We invited them to tell us more how user-testing influences the design of an app, and what the data they have begun to analyze reveals.   Last year, Tinybop launched an app…

How do we live together in a connected world? How do we cultivate “global citizens” who can relate to others—across international borders and Internet forums, or political aisles and bus aisles? These are increasingly pressing questions, and ones that are considered by two recent publications: The Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Digital Play for Global Citizens, by Dr. Jordan Shapiro UNESCO’s Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP)’s “The Limits and Strengths of Using Digital Games as…

Thanks to the wonderful Dr. Jessica Piotrowski on behalf of the Center for Research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media in Amsterdam as well as Northwestern’s Center for Media & Human Development and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, I was fortunate to be part of a preconference of the International Communication Association’s Children and Media Division this past May. The goal of the preconference, titled “Invention & Intervention: Blending Research with Practice to Develop Effective Media for Youth” was to…

I recently met Paul Darvasi and Aleksander Husøy at the annual UNESCO Forum on Global Citizenship Education in Ottawa, where we were on a panel hosted by the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. The subject of our panel was a debate on the topic, “Innovative pedagogies for ESD and Global Citizenship Education: Is game-based learning the future?” Both Paul and Aleks use games in the classroom often when they’re teaching and I’ve been creating them for the past nine years, so frankly, there wasn’t all that much debate…

A little while back I was playing Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare with one of my patients, we’ll call him Alex*.  Twenty minutes into our game, I was clearly losing badly and dying a lot.  Although I am a gamer-affirmative therapist, first-person shooters have never been a favorite of mine.  In fact it was only recently that I started playing them at home and with patients at all.  The game ended with me having died 25 times to his 2. …