Tag Archives: youth

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.

This past spring, Global Kids worked on a crowdsourced project to develop “Six Ways to Look at Badging Systems Designed for Learning,” a list of six different goals that badging systems are often designed to meet. During the summer, we beta-tested our own badging system within two of our programs to see in which of these six ways we could demonstrate positive growth. The first program was the Virtual Video Project, which focused on creating an animated film about climate…

They say that every summer has a story, and now at the end of my experience teaching for the Gamestar Mechanic Online Learning Program, it’s time for my students’ stories to come to an end. But it’s wonderful to realize that for many of them getting more interested and involved with game design, this is just the beginning. As we wrapped up the program last week, my inbox was filled with an exciting flurry of final assignments, last chances to…

Much of what we hear when people talk about games for learning may be behind the potential of video games to teach traditional content, but there’s also a very exciting, and increasingly popular trend in education of kids as game designers. But what do we really mean when we say kids as designers? What skills and perspectives are kids getting by engaging in the game design process? As Aaron Morris recently discussed on the Cooney Center blog, an essential part of “21st Century Skills”…

As a graduate student studying games for learning, and a general geek extraordinaire, I’ve been given the unique opportunity this summer to teach a new online program for kids who want to learn how to design video games. E-Line Media, a Cooney Center partner in the National STEM Video Game Challenge, and the creator of the game-building platform Gamestar Mechanic, has designed an engaging curriculum that teaches kids not only how to make their own games, but also what it is that game…

Hello again! When I wrote my blog post on my experiences as one of the Educator Winners from the 2012 STEM Video Game Challenge, I didn’t have a chance to discuss my method for designing games for students. I’ve thought about this quite a bit, and wanted to share some of my tips with other aspiring game designers here. First, there are two good articles on video games and learning at the STEM Challenge website at the bottom of their Resources page. These…

Hello everyone! My name is Marty Esterman and I am the Educator Grand Prize winner for the PBS Kids stream in this year’s STEM Video Game Challenge event for my entry, AdditionBlocks. I have been quite humbled by this whole experience-and I want to thank The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, PBS Kids, E-Line Media, and the AMD Foundation for all their support. I have met some really great people! I also want to thank my wife, Stacy, who has also been…