Tag Archives: games

The Games for Change Festival starts bright and early tomorrow morning in New York City, where game designers, investors, journalists, and researchers will gather for a four-day investigation of the current state of serious gaming. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be there, hoping to engage with a community who we believe possesses a cultural connection to the young learners of today. Earlier this month, another game-focused meeting of minds took place in New York, albeit in a more intimate setting and…

This year the Cooney Center attended SXSWedu in full force, with three separate opportunities to share our work on how teachers, researchers, game developers, and investors are bringing true games-based learning to K-12 classrooms.  After presenting with Allisyn Levy of BrainPOP and Julie Evans of Project Tomorrow on Monday, I was able to relax and enjoy the rest of conference, including Michael Levine’s Digital Playground talk on Tuesday and the Games & Learning Publishing Council session later that afternoon. Here…

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…

Sandbox Summit, an idea forum focused on the intersection of play, learning and technology invites educators, researchers, developers, and innovators of kid-centric media to this annual event at MIT. Presented by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies and Education Arcade, Sandbox Summit@MIT will highlight some of the minds behind – and in front of- today’s revolutionary ideas, platforms, places and products. From toys and games, to schools, museums, media and marketing, you’ll hear about the ways and whys purposeful designs power playful…

One morning last summer in DeRidder, Louisiana, Angel Acevedo-Martinez’s father came into his room and woke him up with exciting news. Angel’s 6th grade math teacher, Miss Sanchez was on the phone to tell him that his game, The Arcade, had been chosen as a winner in the National STEM Video Game Challenge in Washington, DC. Before that spring, Angel had never designed a game of his own, and now here he was, an award winner in a national competition!…

Since the beginning of Toca Boca, we’ve always tried to invent new ways of playing with screens. Some come very naturally—like creative play—where the touchscreen device gives kids super powers for their creations. Other areas are a little more abstract and take some more thinking. In this more challenging category, we have Toca Builders, which addresses construction play. How can we use a flat 2D touchscreen to help kids create and play with models and patterns? From an adult’s perspective,…

Today brought some good news as one of our proposed panels was selected as part of the SXSWedu conference slated for next March. The session, “Lost in Translation: Applying the Latest Game Research,” emerged from the 700 submitted ideas to the major education and innovation conference. It’s exciting news for a couple of reasons. First, it is affirmation of one of the major initiatives we are about to launch at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. We have been working through…

Educational psychology has long recognized the impact of informal learning in child development. In fact, most educators and psychologists believe that young students learn more from other kids with shared perspectives and experiences than from adults so far removed from childhood. Whether at home, on the playground, or in the classroom, students assimilate, construct, and in-turn teach and reflect on new knowledge better in informal peer communities than more traditional “instructivist” settings. So wouldn’t it be amazing if we could…

Girls should play more video games. That’s one of the unexpected lessons I take away from a rash of recent studies on the importance of—and the malleability of—spatial skills. First, why spatial skills matter: The ability to mentally manipulate shapes and otherwise understand how the three-dimensional world works turns out to be an important predictor of creative and scholarly achievements, according to research published this month in the journal Psychological Science. The long-term study found that 13-year-olds’ scores on traditional…

In this video, Dr. Constance Steinkuehler talks about her research on video games and literacy, and how learning skyrockets when students are passionate about the subject matter.   Dr. Steinkuehler is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This video appears courtesy of Edutopia.