Tag Archives: youth

This article appeared in Physics Today, January 2021, page 26 and appears here with permission. From Elinor Wonders Why to Emily’s Wonder Lab, a multitude of fresh, dynamic programs have recently premiered that encourage children to channel their inner scientists. Between streaming services and television, today’s young people have more access to quality science programming than ever. But before there was Cyberchase, Wild Kratts, The Magic School Bus, or even Bill Nye the Science Guy, there was the show that started it all: 3-2-1 Contact. Premiering in 1980, 3-2-1…

The “stay safe online” message is being heard loud and clear – but these young gamers can see beyond “don’t talk to strangers”. The “By Gamers, For Gamers” Project was developed by the Alannah & Madeline Foundation in Australia. The project was initially conceived by adults to be co-designed and developed in close partnership with young people. The intention was to gather the advice and experience of gamers aged 15-18 years, and then share that advice in their own words…

PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL) launched On Our Minds with Noah+Zion, a limited-run podcast series on teen mental health this spring. Over a series of five episodes, 16-year-old hosts Noah Konevitch of Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Zion Williams of Clinton Township, Michigan, explored various mental health challenges affecting today’s teens, and shared coping mechanisms from mental health experts. The Cooney Center caught up with Noah and Zion this summer to find out what they learned about making a podcast for the…

“We used to love playing Xbox all day. That used to be great. But now that it’s all we really do or have to do, they’re always like, ‘Oh, I’m so bored of Xbox. I just wanna do something else.’” (Boy, Age 17 / Pasco County, Florida) Last year the Joan Ganz Cooney Center launched the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences initiative. Next Gen Public Media aims to “understand the media habits of tweens and teens and…

In Spring 2020, as schools around the United States were forced to turn to remote learning methods, a number of research teams around the country mobilized to study how families were adjusting to the pandemic. In July 2020, Dr. Brigid Barron and her team at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center convened a virtual workshop with research teams from Stanford, University of Washington, and the University of Michigan to explore innovative methods for studying…

After two tough years of pandemic disruption, young people have a lot to say about their experiences, struggles, and hopes for the future. And we as educators and public media creators have a unique opportunity to help students reconnect with their schools and communities–and reenergize our airwaves and digital channels with Gen Z voices.  This is one reason we’re excited about KQED’s seven Youth Media Challenges (YMCs). Valuable learning and powerful mediamaking arise when we give young people space to…

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.” –Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019) Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices,…

Zoom school may be over for most of us, but many of our children will continue to spend more time online each week than they do in physical schools. Digital devices in the hands of today’s teens and tweens are here to stay. We need to start investing in the digital infrastructure that undergirds their development, in the same way we invest in our younger children’s daycares and playgrounds. I will explain why. Adolescents are connecting more online For close…

In the 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney published The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, a report that would revolutionize television for children. Where others saw a “vast wasteland,” Cooney saw possibility, and from it, educational programming for children, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was born. Half a century later, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Corporation for Public Broadcasting seek to carry forward this vision of programming with the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences…

On January 26,  2021, the Cooney Center’s Executive Director Michael Preston and Senior Fellows Monica Bulger, Mary Madden, and Rafi Santo presented a session called Tweens and Teens: Public Media’s Missing Audience at the 2021 National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) Conference and CPB Public Media Thought Leader Forum. The goal of the session was to share findings from our latest research on tweens and teens and their media habits, as well as ideas and opportunities for public media to serve…