Tag Archives: youth

This past week, the Institute of Museum and Library Services hosted The Capitol Hill Maker Faire as a part of the White House’s National Week of Making.  The STEM Challenge attended the Faire to network with other organizations and spaces that are also devoted to making and innovation. The Faire explored the best practices and challenges of the maker community, in order to foster educators’ and community leaders’ efforts to further innovation across the country. The organizations represented at the…

Empow Studios brings technology, arts, and play together to help young learners discover and build on their creative talents. They teach classes in programming, robotics, video game design, animation, design, audio engineering and other creative skills for the 21st century at over 20 locations in Massachusetts. Many of the students enrolled in their summer programs are designing games that are eligible for submission into the 2016 National STEM Video Game Challenge. When 22-year-old Lynne Richman had her first taste of…

Almost every child in the United States plays video games—91% of children ages 2-17, according to NPD. But how many kids make their own video games? I could not find any reliable statistics. Nowadays, one barely needs to write a line of code in order to build a video game because there are so many platforms that make the process simple. Gamestar Mechanic, Unity, GameMaker, and Scratch are probably the most popular. Each one involves a different amount of complexity…

The entries are in for the National STEM Video Game Challenge, and our expert judges have been busy playing video games! This year we’ve received more than 4,000 entries in the following categories: Gamestar Mechanic, Gamemaker, Scratch, Unity, Open Platforms, and Written Design Documents. The STEM Challenge has hosted more than 35 game design workshops across the country for youth and educators. The energy at these workshops was amazing—read more about a youth workshop that took place at the Science…

Personally, I believe in general, when you look at the new assessments, you look at the new standards, you look at what employers want, you look at what people really need to thrive, they tend to align well with inquiry-based learning, blended learning. … But the fact is it’s really hard to design, develop, implement and support those types of learnings. I believe the people who can do that are going to experience enormous success. – Alan Gershenfeld, president and…

This year, I had the great privilege to attend the Digital Media and Learning Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, where I had organized a panel called “Creating Youth Builders – Promoting a New Game Design Ecosystem to Engage Hard-to-Reach Youth in Learning.” The heavy hitters on the panel included Jennifer Groff, a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab and the VP of Learning for the Learning Games Network, Ricarose Roque, a PhD student with the Scratch Team at the MIT…

This year, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center will be a part of not just one, but two sessions at the Digital Media and Learning Conference, an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub. The conference, which takes place March 6-8th, 2014 in Boston, brings together scholars and practitioners who aim to foster interdisciplinary and participatory dialog while linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice. This year is focused on the…

On Wednesday, a panel of education professionals, teachers, and tech-savvy students took the stage for the final day of the 10th annual Games for Change Festival held at New World Stages in New York City. Moderated by Forbes blogger, Jordan Shapiro, the panel participants discussed their experience with the National STEM Video Game Challenge, a national program founded by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and E-Line Media that encourages youth in grades 5-12 to create playable video games that utilize…

Cooney Center fellow Christina Hinton is moderating a panel at the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Conference called Getting Global With It: Youth Global Participation in the Digital Age With an internationally interdependent economy, unprecedented levels of migration, and a continuous stream of information circulating the planet, children are growing up in a globalized world. In this era of globalization, children need to develop intercultural understanding. Modern digital technologies provide exciting new avenues for helping children gain this important skill.…

This conference focuses on preparing children to be caring people, ethical workers, and engaged citizens today and in the future amidst the rise of new devices. Hosted by Project Zero, an educational research group at Harvard, the conference invites educators, parents, administrators, and policy makers for exciting discussions and demos of technology in children’s lives. For more information, visit the official site.