Tag Archives: research

It seems like we’re having a lot of conversations about teens and tweens these days. Or youth? Young people? All of these terms get used by various disciplines, and some even get used by the young people themselves. However you talk about it, it’s clear that public media needs to be ready for the next generation of audiences (and technology)—because they’re already here. Right now, we’re in the middle of a new research project called By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen…

Our colleagues at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab are conducting a research survey to investigate the role of VR in educational strategies catered to children while families are sheltering at home as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses. If you are a parent or guardian of a child in grades K-12 and you have a VR headset at home, please consider participating!    Governments all over the globe have decided to close schools temporarily in an attempt to slow down the…

Balancing working from home, schooling from home, playing at home, and just having the entire family at home during these times can be a challenge. For families who have dedicated voice assistants, like the Echo or Google Home, there might be some strategies parents can use to help augment their parenting tasks during these times of social distancing and sheltering in place. I was a member of a research team which investigated how families adopt and use smart speakers, like…

As if any of us needed a reminder, the last few days showed us how quickly things can change. A month ago—or even a week ago—no one knew quite how different our day-to-day lives would be. Suddenly, kids are out of school, parents are working from home, and the way we socialize and interact with each other has seismically shifted. Now more than ever, families need to feel confident in their technology—which has been helping us stay connected when we…

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.…

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…

This article was originally published on Medium in 2016 when Sesame Workshop joined forces with Reach Capital to invest in emerging companies innovating in education, health, and social welfare for children, and appears here with permission. We are honored to partner with Sesame Workshop, one of the world’s most innovative, venerable education organizations for nearly 50 years. Sesame’s experience in children’s media, early childhood development and social-emotional learning is invaluable to our fund and portfolio companies. At Reach, we believe these…

You may have heard that television programming in the 1960s was called a “vast wasteland.” by then-FCC Chairman Newton Minow. From the beginning, Lloyd Morrisett and I were both convinced that television – which was capturing the attention of children as nothing else was – did have the power to educate as well as to entertain and we set out to prove it. It was back in 1966 when I wrote my original report, The Potential Uses of Television in…

Young adults face many options when they go online—they might learn a new skill or lurk on a Discord channel; make a new friend or mock an existing one; create content or consume it. My research focuses on why young women choose to pursue positive opportunities new technology offers instead of risky or harmful activities. To answer this question, I analyzed the results from two large scale surveys of British teenagers, ran a quasi-experiment with 100 American teenagers attending a…

Growing up in the 1980’s, I played with a lot of toys and technology. My first experience with a computer was an Apple IIe at school, where I played Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. At home, my technology-enabled toys consisted of a Speak and Spell that would repeat what I would type, and  video game consoles like the Atari 2600 and Nintendo. When I look back, I don’t recall ever thinking these were creepy experiences. The Speak and…