Tag Archives: storytelling

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…

Global Kids, Inc. works to ensure that youth from underserved areas have the knowledge, skills, experiences and values they need to succeed in school, participate effectively in the democratic process, and achieve leadership in their communities and on the global stage.  Many of the students in their programs are creating games eligible for submission into the 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge. Through in-school and after-school Global Kids (GK) programs, middle school and high school students examine global issues, make…

What if we could reimagine the iPad as an augmented reality camera for kids to act out their own stories – a costume box for the 21st century? Introducing: TeleStory You’ve all heard the stats. One in three American kids are obese or overweight and will suffer from diabetes at some point in their lives[1]. After diet and exercise, two of the biggest culprits in this epidemic are TV and gaming—the average 8-18 year-old spends 7.5 hours every day on…

At Launchpad Toys, we’re working to inspire creativity in children through play with digital toys and tools like our flagship storytelling app, Toontastic. As tablet usage in young children increases year after year (NPD showed 13% growth between 2011 and 2012), it has become more important than ever to provide kids with quality learning tools that maximize their time on touchscreen devices. Still, in the immortal words of former President George W. Bush, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our…

Two weeks ago, this blog featured a preview of Robot Heart Stories (R<3S), a 10-day transmedia learning project in which two classrooms in underserved neighborhoods in Montreal (French speaking) and Los Angeles (English speaking) used collaboration and creative problem solving to help a lost robot navigate across North America before hitching a ride back to space with NASA on a launch to the International Space Station, scheduled sometime early next year. The robot (symbolized by a stuffed animal version embedded…

The leaves are changing, the air is getting crisp… and your teeth are hurting just LOOKING at all the candy stacked up in the grocery aisles. Yes, it’s October and Halloween is just around the corner! To celebrate this most playfully creative holiday, we’re very excited to announce that the Cooney Center is partnering with Mobile Learning Finalist Launchpad Toys to create a Spooky Story Contest for kids and parents to create and share their favorite Ghost Stories and Terrifying…

According to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the typical American child — age 8 to 18 — spends no less than seven and a half hours a day engaged with media. According to research from Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, younger children are also consuming media heavily — about 4 hours a day for the typical five year old. Television, cell phones, computers, etc. are not just part of these children’s lives — in a very…

Makeda Mays Green is the Director of Education and Research for Digital Media at Sesame Workshop. We were lucky to have her join us in LA for the Leadership Forum in May. She shares her thoughts on the event and some of her favorite takeaways.   The “Learning from Hollywood” forum was nothing short of amazing! It presented a rare opportunity to connect leaders from the entertainment industry with educational experts from around the country. Over the course of two…

Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture…