If somebody asked you to name the masters of interactive design, chances are good that Will Wright would be on your list. He created SimCity which led to SimAnt, The Sims, and Spore, and he’s currently working on a new social game called HiveMind. Last year in New York, I heard him speak and was struck by his thoughts about the learning opportunities he brings to his players, and asked him about it. What does he think about when he makes a game? What are some key influences? (Note that this was a long interview, and edits have been made for clarity).

Scott Traylor: In your presentations you often refer to learning theory, including your own Montessori education. It seems you have a passion for the topic.

Will Wright: Learning theory is certainly one of the factors that shapes my talks and my work in general, but it’s only one element. For me, making a game or a talk is a process of continual self-discovery.

Scott: Can this be attributed to your Montessori background?

Will: Montessori is good for self-discovery and exploration, but Montessori didn’t invent it. Self-discovery and exploration have existed for millennia before Montessori. it’s the way the human brain works. The whole constructivist approach to education simply leverages hardware that’s already built in.

Scott: When you say “constructivist” is it fair to say that you are thinking of Piaget and perhaps Seymore Papert?

Will: Oh, yes, and Alan Kay as well. This formalized approach to learning has really only been around for maybe a 100 years. We can go back hundreds and hundreds of years before that and see people understood this as the primary mode of learning. Consider the Renaissance and Leonardo Da Vinci. At some point the pedagogy got wrapped around that inherent process. It’s something that has remained, almost becoming more relevant in terms of its implications with modern technology, or our imaginations, and our creativity. It’s almost more relevant now where people can approach a wider range of endeavors creatively, because of the tools we have, for gathering information, for creating things, for sharing things.

Scott: So you’re saying we’re at a point, technically speaking, where we are empowered as creators, as explorers, in anything that might interest us?

Will: Yes, especially in things like the social dimension. I can create something and put it up on the web and then by tomorrow 1,000 people might’ve seen it. Think back 100 years ago what it would have taken for that to happen. It just wasn’t a possibility then, but now it’s a possibility for anyone.

Scott: While these theories have become more formalized in the last century or so, good teachers and good facilitators of learning have been aware of these things for ages. Now there’s the opportunity for learning to be amped up through technology and through participation in a way we have never experience before, in such an immediate way.

Will: Yeah, Seymour Papert and Alan Kay were among the first people to realize the impact that modern technology was going to have. Nicholas Negroponte, as well.

Scott: When you talk about games, or video games, you often refer to these things as playful objects. Is that intentional?

Will: Let’s take a look at that. People like to call the things I make games, but I tend to think of them as toys. There really needs to be more open-ended play experiences and that’s a broader world than the formal definition of games. I think a game is really a subset of the world of play. In substance it’s really just semantics but it’s cultural as well. A lot of people think of games, video games, as this brand new thing that’s popped up. But of course games have been around forever. Most games are based on some fundamental play experience that at some point becomes formalized. There are different connotations to play, and with that formal rules. You might play with others, or by yourself, the play might be a zero sum game, or not. These are just a few specialized versions of play in my mind.

Scott: Are there any play experts you follow?

Will: Not really. There have been a lot of attempts in the game design community to come up with more formal structures of frameworks to understand this. I think we’re just beginning to scratch the surface. They’re looking at the different perspectives on play coming from cognitive science or sociology or evolutionary psychology. I don’t think any one of these things is going to capture the subject completely. You have to triangulate from all these different perspectives.

Scott: Do you think the vocabulary around play and around games is evolving?

Will: In general, yes. A game is like the nucleus of the experience, but it’s not the whole experience. I spend a lot of time thinking about the meta-game, the experiences we’re having around the game, experiences that are the larger iceberg. For example, The Sims is a game on some level, where you can play with goal structures and rules. However, there’s a larger game where people make things and tell stories about the game. Then they try things with online communities. These are the things that people do outside the game. It is what I call the meta-game. To me, the more successful games are the ones that spark these larger meta-games.

Scott: You mean bringing the play or the game experience outside of the game, in some kind of social context, where people can talk about and interact around the game?

Will: Yes, in some sense the game in the player’s minds goes from being a specific entertainment experience to becoming a tool for self-expression. At first they were playing for the fun, just exploring. Then they start realizing they can be expressive with it. It’s almost like playing a musical instrument. At first, you experiment and press buttons. At some point you realize you can compose music. You might even start to perform. Eventually this toy becomes a tool to express one’s self.

Scott: Is it accurate to say that the opportunity for creative expression is also a central part of your games?

Will: it’s one of the more powerful benefits of technology. We can do things now that allow people to come in and craft more interesting experiences and share them with others. Somebody can take something from their imagination, create an external artifact, and then share it. They can even collaborate on larger imaginary structures. This is something that used to be confined to a small number of people that had very high skills in language. These individuals could write a book and describe some imaginary world, like Alice in Wonderland. But not many people had that skill set. Now average people are getting these tools that empower them, to create entire worlds, external to their imagination, to share with other people.

Scott: You have this amazing ability to translate complicated systems into successful play objects. What is your thought process?

Will: First, how much are these things representations of the real world? When I get started it’s usually with something that contains some aspect of the real world that fascinates me. I’ll start to imagine if I had a toy planet, what kind of things would I want to do with it? What kind of processes would I like to see? By connecting the toy to real world, it maintains a relevance. Later that toy becomes the scaffolding for building a more elaborate model. When people get to the point where they realize the toy’s limitations, they start discussing and debating what their more elaborate model is relative to that toy. When players first started playing SimCity they didn’t know what was going on. They started building things, they started exploring what caused land value to go up or down, they explored issues around crime, or pollution. Eventually they get to a point where they say, “I don’t think that’s the way traffic really works” or “I don’t think the land value model is very accurate because of this or that.” They could not have formalized these thoughts without the toy. When a player realizes the limitations of a toy, the user has created a better model for themselves internally that transcends the toy.

Scott: Once a certain of level of mastery is achieved with a game, that’s the point when a player will go out and look for additional information to improve upon those models, those systems that they have in their mind?

Will: Yes, that’s the real model we’re building, actually. The computer is really just a compiler for that model.

Scott: What you have described in a sense are games that are digital manipulatives. Tangible manipulatives are a big part of the Montessori world and early learning. Sometimes I hear educators debate the benefit of digital manipulatives over tangible ones. Even if a digital manipulative doesn’t perfectly represent a system, they lead a user in a direction that helps facilitate further learning and growth and discovery that is more accurate and representational of the actual model.

Photo above: The typical Montessori learning experience is based on time with tangible manipulatives, such as these base 10 beads. There’s 1 bead, 10 beads, 100 beads, and 1,000 beads, in the form of a block. These physical manipulatives help young learners understand small and large, base-10 counting, and maybe even geometry (point, line, plane, volume). Substitute beads with the elements of a city, where you can freely experiment with a different kind of units and rules. Get the idea?

Will: Think about it. That’s what we call the scientific method. Quantum mechanics does not describe, is not reality, but it’s our best model so far for describing what we observe to be reality. it’s not the first model we built to describe it and it’s not the last model we’re going to build either. Each model is making a more accurate understanding of reality. They’re all just models and none of them are accurate representations of actual reality.

Scott: Does the knowledge a user gains through game play transfer into the real world? Do you have an example of people playing games where the user transferred something they learned from a game into the real world?

Will: There are a lot of things people learn from games that can’t be measured on any test. On the surface games don’t necessarily feel like education. But when you look deeper into them they really represent a fundamentally deeper level of education. There’s a common story I hear from players of The Sims. Someone will be playing the game and they really get into it. They make sure to take care of the basic needs of their Sims, getting them fed and rested before they go to work the next day. These players can get totally obsessed over making their virtual lives perfect. In doing so, a Sim might get a promotion at work the next day. At some point many players experience an “a-ha” moment — that its 2:00 in the morning, and they have to go to work the next day. Then somehow the players understand that they were taking better care of their Sim than they were of themselves. They were making sure their Sim got to bed on time, was well rested for work the next day, while the players were staying up late playing this silly computer game. For these players this is where they started understanding the strategy within the Sims as a time management game. it’s a game where you juggle many factors. Sometimes a player will step back for the first time and see their real life as a strategy game. As a player, day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, they were making resource management decisions that would impact their Sim in the short term and long term. Then there’s the paradigm shift: What if your real life was a game, and you actually had these resources, and had to develop structures, how would you play it? This is one of those things you’re not going to measure on any standardized test. Through playing the player would walk away from the game thinking deeply about every aspect in their life. “Do I really need to do this now?” or “Should I really spend that money?” For the first time, the game caused them to clearly see the decisions they were making in every day life.

Scott: If the game is the model of a system, which happens to loosely or exactly parallel your own life, at some point, you might reach that a-ha moment.

Will: Right. People who think of themselves as really good strategy players, for some reason never think of their real life as a strategy game. If I were to treat my life as a strategy game how would I play it?

Scott: Will, thanks very much for sharing your thoughts on play, learning, and games. While we have talked about a variety of inspirations and influences across a number of professions, is there one person that has done more to shape your thinking than any other?

Will: My mother, Beverlye Edwards. She supported me with all my crazy ideas as a child. If there was something I was interested in trying or doing, she believed that I knew what I was doing, even if at the time certain ideas seemed slightly odd. Just her believing in me allowed me to keep on trying new things, made me believe in myself, made me confident that I could do something big, something special. I thank my mother, for everything I have, everything I achieved, for her wonderful spirit and the great support she gave during my childhood years and in the years thereafter. I credit all my success in life to her unconditional belief in me and support in my trying something new.

Linkography:

• NY Times – The Long Zoom, by Steven Johnson
  October 8, 2006

• TED Talk – Will Wright makes toys that make worlds
  March, 2007

• NY Times – SimCity Living
  November 21, 2008

• Maria Montessori: The 138-Year-Old Inspiration Behind Spore
  March 29, 2009

• Jeff Braun presentation at Dust or Magic Design Institute
  November 1, 2009

• The Man Behind Spore Explores Gaming as Learning
  February 5, 2011

• Huffington Post – HiveMind Creator Will Wright Hopes To Turn Real-Life Into A Game
  January 2, 2012

It seems wherever I travel, educational publishers, learning theorists, and teachers of all kinds bring up the concept of learning through interactive games. It’s an idea that’s been picking up steam over the last few years, and why not? Research from the PEW Internet and American Life Project last year found that 98% kids ages 12 – 17 play video games. Organizations like the MacArthur Foundation have been funding a small number of projects to test out new ideas for using interactive games with learning in mind. A few months ago I came across a great article in the Economist about a new public school opening in New York City that uses gaming principles to teach its students. At the recent Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age conference held at the Google headquarters, I had the opportunity to speak with Katie Salen, the visionary behind this initiative. You can view a short video of my interview with Katie on the Cooney Center YouTube channel or read the complete interview below. Portions of this interview were edited for clarity:

QUICK QUESTION PICKER:

Tell us about your new school, Quest to Learn.

How did you recruit teachers for your school?

Was it hard to get teachers around the concept of teaching from a game design perspective?

How are the students working with the teachers who apply this teaching model?

How do you divide up the class day?

Is it your intent to open up more Quest to Learn schools?

INTERVIEW:

Scott Traylor: Tell us about the work you’re involved in with the start of your new school, Quest to Learn.

Katie Salen: I run a nonprofit called Institute of Play. Two years ago we started work on a new school with an organization called New Visions for Public Schools. Our new school is called Quest to Learn. The MacArthur Foundation gave us a two year planning grant around the school. The work that we’ve been doing at the Institute of Play centers around the idea of games and learning. We’re really interested in the idea of how we can develop a school that doesn’t necessarily use games in the classroom, but does use game design principles in learning spaces. Our idea was to design a school from the ground up built on those ideas.

We opened Quest to Learn this past September. It will eventually be a 6 to 12th grade school but we started with just the sixth grade this year. Next year we will roll in another grade, continuing to add an additional grade each year for the next six years.

Today we have six teachers and 79 students. We’re located in New York City, in Manhattan. It’s a district two school so we could recruit kids from a specific geographic area in Manhattan. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: How did you go about recruiting teachers for your school?

Salen: We think the way we recruit teachers is actually very interesting. Our process is one in which anybody we bring into the school needs to be immersed in our model. We held a series of four-hour workshops on Sundays for teachers that were interested in our school. They come in, we put them through a learning problem that kids would have and then they do some work with us around assessment. From the list of interested teachers we narrowed it down to a smaller group and then took them through a series of interviews. We also do direct observation in our classrooms.

We had some really specific criteria for the teachers we were looking for. First, teachers had to be content experts, they had to really know their content. Next, the teachers we looked for have to be really good collaborators. Teachers didn’t necessarily have to be technology people, and a lot of them weren’t necessarily gaming people either, but they were able to work in teams or had come from schools where they worked in teams. They had to have a very good sense of how to enable kids to be innovators. This was very important to us. And finally, teachers had to have done project-based work before, our curriculum includes project-based work in it. Those were the three criteria that we looked for. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Was it hard to get teachers around the concept of teaching from a game design perspective?

Salen: You know, when you begin to explain to a teacher how a game designer thinks about the design of the game, and we’re able to show them a one-to-one parallel with how they think about teaching students, they say “Oh, it’s the same thing.” Then they realize “Oh, maybe it’s the words that are different” and so it’s about helping them understand and translate between something like the term “core mechanic” in games, which talks about the primary activity of the player, and the learning design, because the curriculum is the basic activity of the lesson. It’s a learning curve for everybody. Game language, as with any other language, can feel very specialist, but the concepts aren’t so new. That’s our whole argument. Games actually model good learning and good teachers are immersed in good learning all the time. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Quest to Learn has only been in operation for a short while now. Any observations this early about how the students are working with the teachers who apply this model?

Salen: Well the interesting thing is that the kids are so excited to come to school every day. We have parents saying this is the first time that their student has ever come home excited to tell them about what they’re doing in school. This is the first time that their child gets up out of bed and wants to go to school. So that’s great just from an engagement perspective. It’s a place where kids feel safe. It’s a place where they feel excited about coming which is no small feat for a new school where kids are coming from many different neighborhoods. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: How do you divide up the class day?

Salen: When you design a school from the ground up, you attend to every detail. One of the things we spent a lot of time thinking about was the daily schedule. A lot of schools use the Carnegie Unit, classes that are 45 to 50 minutes long. We don’t believe good learning can happen in 45 minutes. From the beginning we wanted to use block scheduling which are extended periods of time.

The main classes we offer, domain classes, last 88 minutes. In a typical day a student will take two domain classes. Since we have an integrated curriculum students will take a class that’s an integrated math/science class and an integrated math/English language arts class. They may be dealing with three or four subjects in a day, but only in two full classes.

There are shorter classes called annex classes, which are extended enrichment and literacy periods. There’s also a gym period for 50 minutes.

For elementary school kids it’s a bit of a shift to be in a class for 88 minutes because they’re used to changing topics with every 45-minute class period. Because our students are working in a problem-based way, the time goes by in a second. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Looking to the future, is it your intent to open up more Quest to Learn schools?

Salen: Everyone always asks us about scale. To be honest, it’s not the first thing we’re thinking about. We’re still in a fact-finding stage to understand what’s working about our model. However, our curriculum is modular. We piloted it in schools before we opened Quest. Everything we produce is open source and online. Any teacher can take what we’ve created and use it right now. The professional development program we have is something that could be used by any school. Our vision is not to make a hundred or two hundred Quest to Learn schools. Over time maybe other organizations will be inspired by the ideas we developed and seek to build schools that share a similar model. (Return to Question Picker)

If you’re attending a conference on forward thinking ways to help kids learn, or maybe an event on learning through video games, chances are you will be listening to thoughts offered by James Paul Gee. Dr. Gee is a noted expert on the topic of video games and learning. He is the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University and is a member of the National Academy of Education. His work has been published widely in journals in linguistics, psychology, the social sciences and education. Dr. Gee’s recent book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy argues that good video games are designed to enhance learning through effective learning principles supported by research in the Learning Sciences. His new book, Women and Gaming: The Sims and 21st Century Learning, written with Elisabeth R Hayes, will be available this coming May, 2010. At the recent Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age conference held at the Google headquarters, I had the opportunity to speak with James. You can view a short video of my interview with Dr. Gee on the Cooney Center YouTube channel or read the complete interview below. Portions of this interview were edited for clarity:

QUICK QUESTION PICKER:

What successes do you see in the learning games movement?

Why do you think games are not perceived as effective learning tools?

Would a funding approach that is similar to public television be a good model for the learning games industry?

What excites you when you see kids developing their own games?

How are learning games best used to accelerate learning?

INTERVIEW:

Scott Traylor: Where do you think things stand today with the learning games movement? What successes do you see?

James Paul Gee: Successes have been slow in coming, much more slowly than I would have thought, but they are coming. What I’m seeing is the beginning of noncommercial games for learning.

Looking back on the gaming industry, developers made products that were expectable, products that were designed by baby boomers and made by principles of instructional technology. These games didn’t break the mold, and didn’t break out of a pattern. They were not good games and did not include good learning. Today we’re beginning to see games being developed by young game designers who understand learning and understand game design. They’re making good games, and they are making things that work. Over the next few years we’re going to see a real explosion in better products. Some of this has to do with the appearance of the independent game studios. In the commercial world the independent games community has been very slow to develop. For a while there really was none, but now with downloading services across all major platforms, you’re seeing many independent games being developed. Games like Flower and Braid, made with relatively small budgets, but they are really top games. Independent games like these are doing as well as many of the commercial games out on the market, and they’re setting the standard for so called “serious games,” games that have the ability to teach. If we can make commercial games that are as good as Flower or Braid for a modest budget, we certainly can make games in the learning sphere that are equally as good. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Why do you think games are not perceived as effective learning tools?

Gee: I think the major reasons are cultural, along with the slow development of an independent game industry, but also the power of baby boomers. People of my age, baby boomers, have theories and are in relatively solid positions in institutions. They get to call the shots, but this is a changed world. We’re talking about learning and using technologies that people under thirty know a lot more about. It’s not surprising when they apply our theories and do a better job than when we applied our theories. I think that’s all good, we need to release that creative energy.

The other thing you touch on, and it’s a very serious matter, is that we really don’t have many new business models. Think about it. We’re trying to make things that do social good, but if the social good is done for free, it dies when the grant ends. Right? We now realize we have to think about how to make products that can go on for a long period of time, and at some level earn enough money to sustain themselves while still doing social good. Lots of people are now thinking about how we can create new and innovative business models so that everybody wins. Models that allow people to make enough money and at the same time spur new businesses, new enterprises to open up, models which will help everybody benefit. Until we really get that down, what you’ll end up seeing are products that are made on government dollars that die the day the grant is over. The same is true with academic research, the day the grant money stops coming in the research stops. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Would you suggest a financial approach that is similar to public television? Would that be a good model for growing a learning games industry?

Gee: There’s going be a whole new set of models. Open source, the public sharing of programming resources, is one very important area. A public television model around games that would include both design workshops as well as giving out products, and also encouraging consumers to make products, would certainly be one model. We just have to have new models for new businesses. There are going to be “double bottom line” businesses; businesses that are committed to social good by solving our educational problems but these same businesses would be committed to making money. Making money not just to enrich individuals, but to also keep the social good going. There are a number of models we can think of for that. As is true of many academics, we didn’t think that business models were important. Now people are starting to see that business models are needed to bring about long-term impact. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: What excites you when you see kids developing their own games?

Gee: I’m excited that so many young people today are taking gaming beyond gaming. They’re not just playing games. They’re making games. They’re designing things for games. They’re setting up discussions and guilds and websites around games. They’re learning new software, software that contributes to these sites and discussions and products. And very often, they organize themselves into learning communities to do all of this. Their passion for learning in these communities grows beyond their passion for the games themselves. In other words, it’s a trajectory towards learning communities, and towards thinking like a designer, and producing, and not just consuming, that some of our best games give rise to.

The video game Spore is a great example. Spore is designed so that you play, and then you design, and then you play, and you join a community, and you get the products you have designed to appear within the game, and then you design with others collaboratively. This game provides very good tools to do that. Anyone, from the very young to the very old, can play.

Another great example is the game Little Big Planet. There’s a whole bunch of products coming out that say why don’t you see playing and designing as things you can do together in a game. These things are integrated together, so the game becomes as much your product as it is ours, and becomes a community event and not just an individual event. The lessons here for education are massive, because it means we’re going have to start designing, not just pieces of software, but ways for people to set up learning communities that they’re productive within. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: So the perception that learning games alone will result in really good learning outcomes, is not the full story. What you’re saying is that learning games, supported by learning communities, are really the combination that accelerates the learning opportunity?

Gee: Those of us who study learning games make the distinction between a game, which is just the software, and the game with a capital “G”, which is the whole set of social learning interactions built around the game. We used to argue, if you’re going to use games for learning, you have to have a community of learning built around the game. Now the commercial industry realizes you won’t make money if you don’t build a learning community around the game. It’s an integral part to gaming, to participate in a collaborative community around the game.

My work has never been that of an advocate to put games into schools. That’s a fine thing to do, but that’s not what my work is about. It’s about putting the learning found in games into schools, learning that’s centered on problem solving and collaboration.

In school students get a bunch of facts and information. You can’t solve problems with it, so you get nothing. The interesting thing is if I make you solve a problem, and I really design the experience of that problem, guiding you and mentoring you, which is what good game design does, you get problem solving and you get facts and information, because you have to learn that in order to solve the problem. I will also get you to collaborate in a community where you might even innovate. You’re going to design new things and do new stuff. I want to see that model go into schools and that model doesn’t have to be a game. We can do that in the world in many different ways.

The other thing I really want to stress about games is that, in my opinion, it’s not a good idea to try to teach a whole curriculum through games. Industries are building up to try to do this. It’s too expensive. We want to learn in many different ways. Games are particularly good for preparation for future learning. If you want to motivate somebody in an area like chemistry or physics, a game is an ideal way to not only motivate that learning, to get learners to see why you do it, what is good about it, why it would be a turn on to do it, but it also prepares them to get ready for learning in the future. That future learning doesn’t have to occur in games. We tend to get obsessed with one platform, but just like in the world where kids don’t just game, they also go on the internet, and they write fiction, and they mod games. They do a whole bunch of stuff. We want our curriculum to be a whole bunch of stuff as well. (Return to Question Picker)

In the last week of October, I was invited to participate in a conference that was held at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA called Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age. While I was at the event I had the opportunity to interview a number of thought leaders involved in the world of technology and learning. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street, I thought it fitting to begin with an interview I had with Gary Knell, President and CEO of Sesame Workshop. The following is a transcription of our discussion. Portions of this interview were edited for clarity. Stay tuned for more interviews in the coming days and weeks.

QUICK QUESTION PICKER:

When looking at expanding into other mediums, how will you apply the Sesame philosophy?

In terms of metrics, do you see Sesame’s on air numbers going down and online numbers going up?

Is it more challenging today for creators of younger children’s content to be on air?

In regards to testifying on Capitol Hill about the Children’s Television Act, what outcome are you looking for?

Do we need the Children’s Television Act for other media formats?

What is the Cooney Prize?

INTERVIEW:

Scott Traylor: Congratulations on the upcoming 40th anniversary of Sesame Street. It’s amazing to think how far the Sesame Street show has come, a show that is often called the “educational television standard.” When you look at expanding into other mediums, how do you think you will be applying that same Sesame philosophy?

Gary Knell: Well the show was invented 40 years ago and has now won more Emmy Awards than any television show in history. Recently we were awarded the lifetime achievement award at the Emmy’s with a standing ovation from, I think, everyone who ever worked in daytime television. But we know today that children are using applications that weren’t invented back when we started the show, and media and technology is getting faster, smaller, and cheaper. So it’s a world of on demand media, portability, those are places that we have to be because those are the access points to where kids are going to find Sesame Street. This was the first year we have ever seen more people and more children access Sesame Street content off television than on television. That’s through video on demand, that’s through iTunes, that’s through YouTube, that’s through our website. It’s through all of the different ways in which we are spreading our content now because that’s where the audience is going. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: So if you were just looking at the metrics of how viewers are watching Sesame Street, you see on air numbers going down and online numbers going up?

Knell: Well I think you’re generally seeing that across television, and certainly network television and PBS is no exception to that because there are a couple of things happening. Sesame Street was one of two preschool shows in 1988. Today there are 54 preschool shows on television. If you just look at market share, you’re not going to have the same market share today that you did 20 years ago. But more importantly, kids and parents are just accessing media differently today. For example, I was just chatting with someone at the University of California here who told me about her daughter who does not watch television but when she sees mom on her laptop, sits down in her lap and says, “Can we watch Elmo for ten minutes?” And I think that’s what’s happening now. I think you’re finding parents who are trying to have more of a control over their child’s viewing habits and behaviors. The TV becomes less of an available babysitter. Interactive technologies give us all the ability to have a more vibrant, richer learning experience than one-way television. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Do you think it’s more challenging today for creators of younger children’s content to be on air? In part I look at the example of Viacom recently folding the popular preschool channel Noggin into Nick Jr. I see this move as something that’s a detriment to the entire preschool space. It’s too bad there aren’t more outlets like that.

Knell: Yeah, I think there were a combination of factors to that decision which may have had to do mostly with branding, as well as the economics of children’s programming, because there are 54 shows, so I think Nickelodeon probably made the decision that, well, we need to be under this umbrella because it will attract more people to watch our programs. But I agree with you. I think we have to have some safe spaces for children, where moms and dads can leave their kids in a place where they’re not going to be marketed to, where they’re going to be safe from commercial messaging, and it’s a place where kids are going to have a learning experience. Because we do know, even with the youngest kids, that television teaches. As Joan Ganz Cooney always says, “It’s not whether television teaches, it’s what does it teach.” So we’ve got to be in those spaces today just as we were in 1969. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: Related to those safe spaces for children, I know earlier this summer you were testifying on Capitol Hill in front of Congress about the Children’s Television Act, a bill that a major children’s media advocate, Peggy Charren, was able to see turn into law many years ago. Could you talk a little bit about your latest efforts and what you hope will be achieved?

Knell: Let’s think about how the world of media has changed in the last 20 years. The Internet did not exist 20 years ago, at least in its popular format. What we were trying to urge senators to do was to take a fresh look at this. Maybe the rules about having three hours of educational television on every broadcast station are sort of irrelevant today. I mean most kids don’t know what NBC is necessarily, or channel 9 versus channel 12. It’s really about shows that they’re watching or their platforms online. And I think you’ve got to redefine the space in terms of protecting children’s health and promoting education. So we were trying to promote the idea that there’s a real gap in educational programming today, especially for 6 to 9 year olds, in fact, a bigger gap than there is for preschoolers. The other thing is to make sure that children’s health and welfare are being taken into account. Things like childhood obesity, which have exploded in America over the last decade, in part, many people feel, because of the commercial messages targeting kids with foods that are less than healthy. These are things we were trying to urge Congress to take a fresh look back, 20 years after the initial act, which has become a little bit irrelevant if you go back and look at it. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: One might argue that it’s a bit of a challenge to think about the mindset of Children’s Television Act and applying it online or in other kinds of digital media delivery systems, that in principal it’s a great place to go, but in order to get everyone on the same page to try to implement it across numerous online media outlets, there’s a real challenge there.

Knell: It’s true. Although, you know, children’s content platforms are still children’s content platforms. And so you have these iconic characters who have a huge influence over children. When a major character on some channel is promoting double cheeseburgers, it has a big influence on a child’s behavior. It doesn’t really matter what the distribution platform happens to be. You’re looking at the use of licensed characters to promote unhealthy lifestyles. And those are the things that those of us who care about children’s health need to do something about, and that’s what we’re focusing on, along with a lot of other people. (Return to Question Picker)

Traylor: During the Breakthrough Learning event held at Google recently, you announced the Cooney Prize. Could you share a little bit about what you hope it will spark in the years ahead?

Gary Knell: Well we feel that we’re just beginning to unleash the power of digital media in learning applications. There are a lot of people talking about it. This is a way to specifically bring attention to 6 to 9 year olds, which the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is focused on, and try to promote digital learning for literacy using online platforms and also, specifically, mobile learning platforms. The iPod Touch, for example, could be a very powerful learning platform, without the cell phone component. And being able to connect kids to content in unique ways who otherwise disengage from learning could be a way that reaches them more directly. What we’re trying to do is spur innovation by having a prize contest. We will be giving cash awards to the most innovative people who come forward with the most innovative ideas. We hope this contest will spur innovation. We hope that these ideas can be incubated to go to market, and frankly, we hope that other people will copy this. We want to start a movement in which we challenge the conventional wisdom in the gaming community, for instance, that education can’t sell. This is the same challenge that Joan Cooney had before the launch of Sesame Street when she was told that education can’t sell on television. Well we certainly know that is not the case. You now have 54 shows on air, you have six competing networks, and all of this started because of a dinner party in Manhattan decades ago, when two people got together and thought about the idea of using television to teach children something, something more than showing them sugared cereal commercials. And look what happened. Now fast forward to 2009, we think we can spark a similar outcome. What we want to do is jump start this idea a little bit through these awards. (Return to Question Picker)

I raced out the door last night with one of my young friends for a trip to Toys R Us. By the time we arrived, we had 15 minutes before closing time. We would not let this fact deter our mission, to purchase a very specific Nintendo DS title.

Walking into the store, we were immediately confronted a five foot tall box portraying the tweenage Dora. It welcomed visitors to the store with an announcement for the Dora Links online world that would become available in another week or so. My young companion was pulling my hand, trying to steer me in the direction of the video games department. “Please! Hurry up! They’re going to close!” she yelled as we passed the Star Wars section. My jaw dropped. An amazing display of new Lego and non-Lego Star Wars products called out to me. I immediately lost track of time and space, wishing to savor each shiny new Star Wars item displayed before me. There were many life sized Clone Wars images hanging from the rafters, but every one was labeled “Star Wars.” I wondered if other adults knew about the Clone Wars television show and if they too thought there was some mistake with the display’s labeling.

My friend continued to pull me by numerous Hannah Montana products until finally we made it into the video games section. We found the Nintendo DS isle, but the ScribbleNauts title we came for was nowhere to be found. Clearly this area was a hotbed of activity. We groaned out loud that the shelf was empty and a nearby clerk headed to the storage room to find another box full of ScribbleNauts titles to restock the shelf. It was at that point that I ran into the store manager. Now was my chance to get the inside scoop!

We exchanged some small talk around the successful launch of ScribbleNauts. There was a $15 dollar in-store gift card offer with the purchase of this title. I wondered what the video game store down the street was offering to pull people in. I was happy to avoid that’s store’s nine foot evil battlebot display that guarded the door to announce some futuristic XBox Armageddon game. I was excited to buy my copy at a toy store.

The TRU manager I spoke with was certainly on top of her game, despite the corporate cost savings measure to cancel this year’s event to share the latest and greatest product info with all of their store managers before the holiday.

We stood nearby a shelf lined with about nine different netbooks, those trimmed down laptop-like computers which are best used for web browsing and email. They typically cost between $300 and $350, a sizable sum for a toy store purchase. The only netbook I recognized by name was the Disney netbook. The recently announced Nickelodeon netbook was nowhere to be found. I noticed how each netbook was wrapped with three bulky secure straps, making them look less appealing. I asked the manager how the netbooks were selling. “Well, we’re seeing some movement with them, but not a lot. My assumption is that they’re doing better at stores like BestBuy and other consumer goods stores like that.” I asked specifically about the Disney netbook and she said it wasn’t moving any more than the others, though its light coloring and prominent shelf position made it easier to find over its competitors.

Thinking about the latest news in the video games world, I asked how The Beatles Rock Band title was doing.

“The title is doing well. The peripherals are selling nicely too.”

“Anything else of note that’s selling?” Nothing came to mind for her.

“How about that giant Dora display?” I asked.

“Well, I think people don’t quite know what to make of that one yet. Diego recently has been attracting more attention than Dora. While there are still many people that love Dora, Diego is hot. It’s doing well.”

The manager left to follow up on a call in another part of the store. My young friend told me the reason why Diego is doing better than Dora is because there are animals on Diego’s show. “Oh,” I said. “That makes sense.”

I then brought my ScribbleNauts title, along with the latest Professor Layton title to the counter. I was so excited about a new Professor Layton game, the last one was fantastic.

Trying to strike up a similar conversation with the clerk who was ringing up our purchase I realized there are two kinds of toy people in the world; Those who love toys, love talking about toys, love the business of toys and those who are simply there to punch a clock. I wondered how could anyone not love the toy world, warts and all?

Having completed my purchase, it was announced over the store’s sound system that the store was closed. Now it was my turn to grab my young friend’s hand and drag her through the outside path of the store quickly looking at products we had yet to see.

We scrambled through preschool. Nothing noteworthy stood out which I found very odd. There is always something of interest in this part of the store.

Opposite of the preschool isle there was an end cap display that offered Transformers masks complete with voice pitch shift capability. Cool!

Then we passed a dozen or so miniature, battery powered jeeps and SUVs, the standing out from the crowd. They were all so gigantic in size! My friend wanted to stay here and explore, but there was no time. I wondered how anyone would have space in their garage for such a thing?

Then there was a VTech end cap displaying two different “laptop” computers. These simplified electronic toy computers were targeting young children, but would the 3 inch black and white screen display be enough of a toy offer to maintain a child’s interest, even if that toy was priced for 60 bucks? I began to wonder if the rapid pace of technology change would result in five year olds demanding a real laptop with a real screen next holiday season.

At the end of another isle I was surprised to find that Publications International was still selling their talking books. VTech also had a similar, but smaller talking book display. Okay, maybe I’m jaded, but didn’t the LeapPad and PowerTouch talking book craze move on already? I wondered if the buzz around the Amazon Kindle was behind the decision to keep selling these talking books for another year. Couldn’t any new features be introduced over last year’s model in the domain of toys, reading and technology?

On the way towards the store exit, we passed the Star Wars display again. “No! We have to go!” shouted my young friend. As I was being dragged by the giant Dora display for a second and final time I said “Adiós amigo” and headed out the door. There was so much left to see, so much more to talk about with the store manager. It would have to wait for another visit. Maybe Dora the Explorer is a fitting guest to welcome you to the store after all, whatever her age happens to be, especially if you like to explore the business of toys.

Can you imagine using video games as an effective tool to improve a child’s mind and physical well being? Can you also imagine video games that do more than just passively entertain and become media tools to improve a child’s life? These ideas no longer live in the domain of fantasy, and the researchers at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, a non-profit organization named after the Sesame Street show’s founder, are exploring how new kinds of video games can help promote learning and healthy lives for children across the globe.

Yesterday at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, the Cooney Center released its latest policy brief entitled Game Changer: Investing in Digital Play to Advance Children’s Learning and Health. (Note: Video of this event will be available soon on the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s YouTube channel.) The paper was shared with a crowd of thought leaders specializing in the areas of education, public policy, research, television and video games. Game Changer defines a number of recommendations for a new framework related to learning games and games for health. After the event, which include a panel discussion from a number of pioneers in the learning games and games for health space, I had the opportunity to speak with Ann My Thai, one of the Cooney Center’s lead authors on this paper.

Scott Traylor: Your Game Changer report covers two sizable topics; learning games and games for health. Why one report and not two?

Ann My Thai: This was something we really struggled with because learning games and games for health are both large areas. Learning encompasses all types of content areas, be it literacy, math, programming, or 21st century learning skills. Health on the other hand has a certain kind of knowledge and a certain rigor in the medical field that doesn’t exactly map out in the same way to learning research, especially when you talking about educational intervention research, an area which created a really big challenge in writing this paper. In the end we decided we wanted to stay to the Sesame Workshop philosophy of the “whole child,” or in other words, the many areas of a child’s overall development, not just one area of development. We felt it was important not to ignore one or the other but to present both topics together. There’s strong research that shows learning and health are closely connected in young children. It’s important to address these challenges in both realms when talking about digital media. We suspect these are the areas within digital media that provide the greatest benefits. They can help bridge the gap between home and school as well as provide tailor-made learning for children, areas that are really important in health learning and learning in general.

ST: In your report you cite that the health-based gaming industry is estimated to be a $6.6 billion market. How big is the learning games market?

AMT: That’s a hard question to answer. Defining what is a learning game can be tough to begin with. On one hand you have organizations that are developing learning games in a research-based way, to make games intentionally educational. On the other you have companies who are making games that are fun first, but sometimes accidentally provide great learning opportunities to kids. Financial data exists for the gaming industry generally but I’ve yet to find anything specific that defines the market size of just learning games.

ST: In your report you touch on Henry Jenkins’ Digital Media Literacies Project, a body of work that could provide valuable insights for integrating digital media in the classroom. What do you think it will take for the points defined in the Digital Media Literacies Project to find its way into the classroom?

AMT: I think it’s going to take a complete paradigm shift with everyone who is involved with educating children, from parents to teachers, to school administrators, to reasearchers like us. There are so many ways that learning can work better for students. We need to completely re-envision what it means to be a school. For example, the area of parental involvement with children’s learning alone is huge. There’s a big disconnect between what happens at school and what children do at home. Digital media can be a really powerful tool in this regard, but it won’t happen if there are calls for cell phone bans in schools because news reports claim students are cheating in school by texting with cell phones. I don’t believe this is the response that will keep kids engaged. Kurt Squire, a leading learning games researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, recently said that kids pass notes in class to one another all the time, notes that have been created with pencils. We don’t ban pencils in the classroom. Pencils are a neutral medium, just like cell phones and other technologies. We need to spend more time exploring the benefits of these technologies, instead of banning them for what potential harm they may bring.

ST: Studies find that Nintendo Wii Sports players expended significantly less energy than children playing “real-life” sports. Would you say exergaming is more about behavior change than it is about physical exertion during game play?

AMT: That’s a good question, and one that reminds me of a comment made by Alan Gershenfeld, founder of E-Line Ventures, during today’s panel presentation. Alan wonders if the success of Guitar Hero has inspired children to want to learn how to play guitar. Wouldn’t it be great of we could track increases in guitar sales as as a result of Guitar Hero’s success!

I think behavioral change is one part of it. I also think about communities that may not be safe for children to go outside and play. As the exergaming pioneer Dr. Ernie Medina mentioned in our interviews, exergaming may not necessarily be better than going outside. However, if children are inside and they are playing games, playing games that require children to be physical active are a much better alternative than playing sedentary games. It’s all about a balanced media diet.

ST: How best can we achieve a coordinated effort to improve research related to learning games and games for health?

AMT: Certainly programs like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio national Health Games Research program is a good start. A good first step would be to get people who are developing games to communicate with others across a variety of other important disciplines. Game Changer calls for the government to conduct an inventory to determine what games research is being funded and by which agencies.   This would organize the current research and help accelerate collaboration across silos, which is already starting to happen. The government also needs to create incentives for people to work and play in the same sandbox. The way that academic research is currently being conducted is very much driven by individual researchers. There are not many opportunities for researchers to cross pollinate. This is something that digital media, as well as any other media, requires.

Researchers also need to have more communication with practitioners and people who are using these digital medias as part of their research. There needs to be more incentives to drive and encourage these sorts of collaborations.

ST: Are you hearing any feedback from policy makers about your report? What are they saying?

AMT: People are talking about these issues. This is a really pivotal moment in Washington in terms of setting an agenda for education and health. We hope that policy makers will read this report and see that if children are playing video games for hours a day, why not provide options that are not only entertaining and engaging, but also helpful with improved health and can teach children something as well. We have a briefing coming up with the Office of Science & Technology Policy. We know they have been looking at some of these barriers to multidisciplinary collaboration. We hope that our recommendations will give them some concrete ideas for how to lower those barriers.

Over the last year I’ve worked on a presentation to suggest a few of the difficulties in creating effective learning games. The video included below is of a presentation I delivered this past November at the annual Dust or Magic Children’s New Media Design conference, though some version of it has appeared in a number of other presentations I shared with others in 2008. After taking a look, let me know your thoughts; What is important to think about when developing video games with learning in mind? What products do you think achieve success in this area? Which ones miss the mark completely? Where do you look for inspiration? Enjoy.

Just eight years ago, before the Internet bubble burst, colleges were scrambling to offer as many web development classes as they could. The future of the Internet seemed clear. At the time, I was a computer science teacher, and any class having to do with web programming, interactive development or digital communications had lengthy waiting lists to get in. I considered the growing interest in Internet development skills to be mainly for adults; however, a few years later I was surprised to see students latching on to the Internet as a medium for expression, using the web as their own personal sketch pads to share artwork, writings and ideas with the world.

Today, a similar parallel within the technology world is emerging through gaming. Forward thinking universities are offering game studies programs, with degrees that focus on the world of video games, and for good reason. The video games industry is thriving. In 2007, the US consumer-based video games industry expanded by 43%, growing to almost $18 billion. In 2008, year to date sales are 26% over last year’s record-breaking numbers. Unlike the Web 1.0 past, the video games’ world is ready to grab hold of every new graduate coming out of such programs. Could it be that in just a few short years, students will start creating their own video games as their next digital sketch pad to share their ideas globally? Or could it be – as I believe – that day has already arrived.

In fact, while critics debate whether children today spend more time playing interactive games than watching television, a growing number of kids are already experimenting with digital authoring tools that allow them to express themselves through the creation of digital games. A new darling in this tool chest is a program called Scratch, developed out of MIT. Others similar tools are also available as well: tools like Alice, Squeak, Star Logo, Kerpoof, and yes, even Flash.

With these newly available tools, game creators could fuel a whole new literacy movement based on an intimate understanding of what elements are necessary to make a compelling game experience. For example, a student might choose to play a short “casual” game to learn more about how federal budget decisions play out in the US economy over time. Playing such a game might take 20 minutes to complete and result in an overview understanding of the topic. But the time needed for a student to create that same game would span many weeks. This process would include a lengthy research phase to thoroughly understand every aspect of the federal budget in detail. Only then could the internalized knowledge gained from the topic be applied to create an interesting and compelling game. Can you see future class projects where the assignment turned in at the end of a semester is not a paper, but a game?

This opens up a whole new way of looking at games. To date, a small number of older commercially available video games have been used to facilitate learning in the classroom. Generally, these games were not created intentionally as games that were meant to teach. I refer to this category of games as being “accidentally educational.” However, with the growing strength of games in the consumer world, new and unique genres of games are emerging every month, including games that are developed with learning in mind. These are games that can be used for health-related training, games with a social agenda, games for behavioral change, games for corporate use and yes, games for direct classroom use. I call this new direction in game creation games that are “intentionally educational.”

To understand how the gaming world is evolving, consider the following quote from a few years ago by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, a pioneer in games studies, popular culture, and emerging digital technologies.

“Historically, educational games have been a bit like a spinach sundae – not very tasty and not very good for you, either. That’s because a lot of educational games have been made either by educators who don’t know much about creating compelling game play or by game designers who distort the educational material. As a result, most of the ‘edutainment’ games on the market have all the entertainment value of a bad game and all the educational value of a bad lecture.”

Today, the elements of change are in place to help minimize future spinach sundaes. Many new teachers entering the classroom grew up with video games and have a comfort using new technologies. A recent report from the PEW Internet and American Life Project states that 97% of kids between the ages of 12 and 17 play video games, with 50% of that audience saying they played a video game yesterday. There’s also a growing body of gaming companies interested in bringing to market successful products with defined learning objectives. New channels of communication between content experts, pedagogy experts and game designers are being forged. Games that result in strong learning outcomes are a result of complementing the needs of each of these professionals, without any singular voice overriding another. It is a difficult and challenging balancing act for all, but one that will determine the future of games developed to be successful, intentionally educational experiences.

As my company, 360KID, continues to explore the intersection of games and learning, I find myself coming back to an observation about today’s games movement. Games, very much like books, are a medium for expression and communication. Books are not inherently educational, but they have the potential to be a vehicle for learning. There are books that succeed in facilitating learning, and there are those that don’t. There are books that are controversial, and there are books that are accepted and welcomed into every classroom in the country. Books are a medium, and like books, new technology platforms that play video games are also a medium, though still very young comparatively.

Does this mean that games are good and they belong in the classroom? Yes and no. Like a fine textbook and an excellent teacher, a good game can open up a world of learning possibilities. As publishers and developers of intentionally educational games experiment, fumble, and find successes, only time will reveal their true effectiveness. One thing is certain about the future of digital games: the train has left the station and it is moving fast. There is room for many different disciplines and industry leaders on this train. The question is not if you should jump on the train, but when.

Opening

During the opening keynote, speaker Andy Berndt, managing director of Google’s Creative Lab, described how almost everyone can remember a favorite toy when they were young (link to audio of presentation.) Andy shared his favorite play activity, that being a creative experience which involved the process of inventing new bicycles. When he was a child, what he did was take apart many different bicycles, and because bicycle parts for the most part are standardized in terms of their bolt sizes and screws used to make them, he was able to recombine different bicycle parts into unique, unusual, and exciting combinations. One could say that Andy’s open ended experimentation with bicycle parts was on par with play experiences found in Legos, K’Nex, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, and the like. What is it about Andy’s creative experience that can lead to insights on how best to help facilitate a love of learning? Read on.

The Importance of Play and its Relationship to Learning

The next speaker who I thought did a fantastic job of providing an overview on the importance of play and the learning opportunities that come from play was Nancy Schulman, the director of the 92nd Street Y Nursery School in New York City (link to audio of presentation.) Nancy shared with the audience that one of the best things about her job for the last 18 years was the wonderful opportunity to watch young children play. With that experience she has learned a great deal about the benefits of play not just for preschoolers, but for all ages.

Nancy expressed that educators, psychologists, and even the American Academy of Pediatrics have great concerns today about the quality of children’s play, how children play, and the quantity of time children play. Parents on the other hand express a lot of concern around wanting their children prepared for success at a very early age. Through her work, Nancy speaks with many parents. One of the greatest anxieties she hears from parents is that they want to be sure their child has every advantage, making sure that before they’re five years old they’ve mastered a second language, mastered every sport they might possibly play, and excel at playing a musical instrument as well. While child professionals are encouraging more open ended play in a child’s life, sadly most parents aren’t paying much attention to these recommendations.

When Nancy was asked “What types of skills do kids learn through play? And why is that meaningful in terms of a child’s lifelong appreciation for learning or confidence in their ability to learn?” she responded first with a quote from child development expert David Elkind of Tufts University:

“Play is not a luxury, but rather a crucial dynamic of healthy, physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development at all ages.”

Nancy then discussed each of these developmental benefits and how child initiated play can lay the foundation for learning:

• Social – “Through play, children learn to interact with others. Play prepares children for morale reasoning. They figure out how to resolve a problem with a friend independently.”
  
  
• Intellectual – “They learn to recognize and solve problems. Children get that feeling of mastery that only comes from when they’re challenged but not frustrated at the same time. In academic areas, play is linked to creativity, imagination, and problem solving skills and it lays the groundwork for successful learning experiences in reading, writing, math, and science. If you think about what children do when they play, it’s very language rich. They are interacting with words and language all the time and learning communication skills.”
  
  
• Physical – “In terms of physical development, they can develop through play fine motor skills, gross motor skills, overall strength and integration of their muscles, their brains, and their nerves. It sets apart a start in their lives for healthy living and fitness, which of course, can counter obesity as well.”
  
  
• Emotional – “Play is Joyful. It is probably one of the greatest underpinnings for later adult happiness. It can’t be underestimated how much happiness and joy have in terms of learning as well.”

Survey of Kids Opinions about Play

The next speaker who offered some additional insight into what kids think about their favorite play objects was Peter Shafer, Vice President of Harris Interactive (link to audio of presentation.) Peter shared with the audience a recent online survey conducted in collaboration with the Sandbox Summit of 1,353 US children ages 8 to 18.

There was a wealth of data to digest in this presentation that spoke to tween and teen toy preferences as well as video games and digital toy products. In general I found this data interesting in that it backs up many gut assumptions about what different age groups prefer in their toy playing experiences.

One observation, it appears the definition of a “toy” was intentionally left undefined in this survey. Did survey respondents think a toy was a traditional toy, a technology toy, or maybe even a video game? Parts of the survey appeared to suggest what the differentiation of a toy was while other questions were not as clear.

Here are a few pieces of data I found interesting to pull out of the Harris Interactive Sandbox Summit survey press release:

“How much do you agree or disagree with the following?”
Summary of Strongly/Somewhat Agree

I call your attention to a couple of specific items from the survey (colored in light blue.) For the 8 to 12 age group the most popular response for a toy product was that it should be “entertaining” whereas with the 13 to 18 year old group there is a great appeal in products that “make me think”.

Best Practices for Developing Playful Products

After the Harris Interactive presentation, Carly Shuler, a Cooney Fellow from Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center and educational technologist Carla Engelbrecht Fisher delivered a presentation called “Fun Follows Function: Ten Tips for Developing Quality Toys”. Below I briefly outline each tip, but you can download an audio recording or download a PDF copy of the PowerPoint presentation here.

1. Bridge the gap between industry and academia – This first tip strongly suggests the benefit of bringing together multidisciplinary teams (child development experts, content experts, pedagogy experts, etc.) This first tip is one my company follows frequently. There’s a great paper by Brian Winn and Carrie Heeter, both from Michigan State University, about the important balance needed (and often the necessary heated debate) that comes from working collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams. A copy of this paper can be downloaded here.)
   
   
2. Incorporate research and testing in your product development and discovery process – Any amount of testing, large or small, will have a beneficial impact on your product’s development. From informal focus and user testing groups to serious product research efforts there’s a research approach that can fit your budget.
   
   
3. Track what users do in your product – There’s lots to be learned from watching how your target audience interacts with your product either informally or through data collection. Spend time analyzing what you find.
   
   
4. Read some research – Become familiar with the basics of developmental psychology for the specific age group your developing for. Doing this will help avoid reinventing the wheel. A handout was shared at the conference with many great places to jump start your research reading list. A copy of this reading list can be downloaded here.
   
   
5. Become an observer – Watch kids at play in the real world or even on YouTube (a cool suggestion offered by Carla). Watch how kids interact with products, visit playgrounds, schools, toy stores. Note what’s on the shelf and where it’s located. Also be aware of what’s on sale, it may provide a tip for what’s not selling.
   
   
6. Break the traditional model of one child per screen – Think outside tradition single player models. Think multiple players, or better yet, how can you actively encourage inter-generational participation! Think outside the keyboard box, consider alternative input devices (dance pads, guitars, balance boards.) Consider how you could combine virtual and physical worlds in new ways (like the success Webkins achieved with dual play patterns online and offline.)
   
   
7. Leverage consumer market trends for learning – Consider user generated content, online video, or casual game approaches. Be aware of these every changing trends and you just might find one that will greatly elevate the success of your product.
   
   
8. Go beyond the “3 R’s” – Think 21st Century Skills: Creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication. For more on 21st Century Learning Skills, download this presentation from the May, 2008 Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s first annual symposium.
   
   
9. Become familiar with various game mechanics – There are many different game mechanics that could increase interest and engagement in your product. Some old mechanics can be made new again with the newest technologies.
   
   
10. Tap into your own childhood – Everyone has childhood experiences that can help shape your product for the better. Tap into your own experiences as well as those around you.

Note about Virtual Worlds

Kids and virtual worlds was touched on a few times throughout the day but I thought the following statement was worth calling out in its own section. Peter Shafer of Harris Interactive indicated that we will see explosive growth in the area of virtual worlds specifically for kids. The numbers cited were that there are about 80 virtual world destinations for kids today and by the end of 2010 there will be more than 150 virtual worlds to choose from. For a current list of virtual worlds available, I have the following link to share.

Takeaway

So what’s the key take away for developers, innovators and creators of playful learning products for kids, whether traditional or technological? Here’s the secret sauce that was repeated over an over again through words and through examples:

• Make the play experience as open ended as possible. Think about opportunities for vast exploration, not a limited path of play. Include opportunities to fail as well as ones to succeed. Let each child develop their own unique path to play, one that is customizable enough that it appeals to a single user and flexible enough that multiple users can find their own unique approach.
• Bring together a variety of child experts.
• Become familiar with research.
• Watch your audience, get familiar with your audience, test with your audience.
• Try something new! Break the habit of relying on the same old technology and user input solutions.
• Think 21st Century Skills

Nancy Schulman also offered this sage advice:

“If your child can’t play with a toy in at least three different ways, leave it behind.”

And one last thought for making the next greatest learning toy, digital or otherwise… Think bicycle parts.

Referenced Products and Videos

Here’s a list of digital products and online YouTube videos that were referenced throughout the Summit.

For an audio recording of this interview, click here.

Mitchel Resnick is a researcher, inventor and professor at MIT’s Media Laboratory in Cambrige Massachusetts and the founder of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT. He is the lead innovator behind many cutting-edge learning technologies and projects for children including the , PicoCrickets, and the wildly successful consumer product, Lego Mindstorms.

In this interview Mitchel shares his experiences about his latest online learning product for kids called Scratch. Scratch is a unique digital creativity tool for kids which helps facilitate expression, communication, concepts in interactivity and programming, presentation development, and community-based learning. It consists of an offline application used to create projects, and an online gallery for sharing those projects with other community members and the world. This interview was conducted in the Spring of 2008 and has been edited for clarity purposes.

ST: Can you tell me about the meaning behind your group name, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group?

MR: In our group we’re especially interested in how to help people develop as creative thinkers. It’s our belief that one of the keys to success in the future is going to be one’s ability to think and act creatively. We’re living in a world where things are changing quickly and because of that people need to be able to come up with innovative solutions to unexpected problems.

If our goal is to help people develop as creative thinkers, we then ask ourselves “Well, where can we draw inspiration from? What are good models of how to help people develop as creative thinkers?” As we looked around, we found lots of inspiration from the ways children learn in Kindergarten, especially with traditional Kindergarten. Kindergartens are in the process of changing, but at least in the traditional Kindergarten from its early roots almost 200 years ago, Kindergarten has been a time where kids are constantly engaged in creating things in collaboration with one another in a playful way. Whether they’re building towers out of wooden blocks to make a city, or making pictures with crayons and finger paints, kids in Kindergartens are constantly coming up with ideas, creating things playfully with one another. We’ve seen that that approach is a good way for learning some important concepts in Kindergarten, like learning about number and shape and size and color, but it’s also a very good method to help kids develop as creative thinkers.

By looking at the way children learn in Kindergarten we developed what I call the “creative learning spiral.” In many of the best creative thinking experiences you start with imagination, you come up with an idea, you create something based on your idea, you play and experiment with that idea, you share it with others, you talk about it with them, they try it out, and they give you feedback. Based on that experience, you reflect upon your idea, you think about what happened, and that gives you new ideas. Then you’re right back again at the beginning with imagining – at which point, you keep on spiraling out with new ideas based on this concept of “imagine, create, play, share, reflect, and imagine.” We can see this spiraling concept working really well in most Kindergartens. So we ask ourselves “Why cant we take this same approach to learning and bring it to learners of all ages?” Hence the name of our group, Lifelong Kindergarten.

Kindergarten has been around for a long time. Why hasn’t the Kindergarten approach to learning been adopted for learners of all ages? My thinking is that it’s been difficult to spread that Kindergarten approach through older grades in school and through the continual learning experiences as we get older because we haven’t had the right media, the right technologies, and the right tools.

Crayons, fingerpaints and wooden blocks are great for learning Kindergarten concepts like number, shape, size, and color. As you get older and you want to learn more advanced ideas, then crayons, fingerpaints and wooden blocks are not enough. People then shift to a more “transmission” approach to learning, where we try to deliver information to students in a classroom as a way of helping students learn new things.

This is where I think new technologies can make a big difference. My feeling is if we use new technologies the right way, we can extend the Kindergarten approach to learning to learners of all ages. What we want to do in our Lifelong Kindergarten group is develop new technologies that are in the spirit of crayons, fingerpaints and wooden blocks used in Kindergarten. By using these new technologies, want to allow learners of all ages to work on personally meaningful projects and to continue to learn in that Kindergarten style but to learn more advanced ideas and to work on more advanced projects.

ST: This is a recurring theme with the other projects you have been involved with. Not just Scratch, but also PicoCrickets and the Computer Clubhouse as well.

MR: Yes. The Lifelong Kindergarten Group has been the name of my research group for maybe ten or fifteen years now. We’ve worked on many different projects under that banner. The theme of Lifelong Kindergarten is our broad vision. Within that broad vision we’re always working on different projects. Sometimes its developing new technologies that will help people continue to experiment, explore and express themselves in a Kindergarten style. Sometimes its creating new sites or contexts where we can experiment with how people learn, like the after school Computer Clubhouse settings we started. We’re creating technologies, activities, and environments, both physical and online, that help support this Kindergarten style of learning. Our feeling is that you need lots of different things to support the Kindergarten style of learning. Any one technology is not going to do it.

ST: Kind of a diverse curriculum for older ages?

MR: Yes, and for us to support that approach, we need people with lots of different backgrounds. They can’t just be a bunch of technologists building the technology. It requires not just computer scientists, but also psychologists, educators, designers, and people with expertise in content areas like math and sciences. It also requires people who are not just thinking about developing technologies but who are developing activities and developing different types of real world settings to support all of this.

ST: And you would need theorists as well.

MR: Yes.

ST: I know the work of Seymour Papert has had a strong impact on your thinking and the development of the Computer Clubhouse, Crickets, and Scratch. What areas of Seymour’s work have had the biggest influence on you?

MR: Well, a few different things. It’s from Seymour that I received a real appreciation about the importance of the design experience being interwoven with the learning experience. Many of our best learning experiences come about when we’re actively engaged in designing and creating things. With almost all of our projects, we’re always thinking “How can we engage people in creating and designing?” because we feel many of the best learning experiences come about when you’re creating and designing. That’s one important thing that I’ve learned from Seymour.

A second thing that was a very big influence for me is the importance of supporting a very wide range of different learners. I find that too many toys and educational activities are designed for a very particular type of learner. They might do a good job of supporting that particular type of learner but unfortunately it means that only certain types of people are able to get engaged with important ideas. I was very influenced by Seymour’s efforts to try to broaden the range of people who would get engaged in activities. To make sure you take into account that different people have different styles of learning and that they also have lots of different interests. We really try to think about those issues as we design.

Seymour would talk about developing new technologies in terms them having a “low floor” and a “high ceiling.” A low floor means making it easy for people to get started, and a high ceiling can keep them doing more and more advanced and complex things with it. I then extend this metaphor to say it’s also important to have “wide walls.” This means that you can have many different ways of getting engaged in these activities, not just one narrow way of doing it.

Also, the idea of connecting with people’s passions is also something I took away from Seymour. In his book Mindstorms, he starts with a wonderful essay about his own experiences as a child playing with gears. Playing with gears gave him a way of thinking about different mathematical ideas. An important part of this essay was Seymour saying he “fell in love with gears.” That’s the phrasing he uses and I think it’s an important one. It’s not just that he learned about gears, but he fell in love with gears. It’s all about the importance of engaging someone’s passion in what they’re learning. The lesson is not that we should be giving gears to everybody, it’s that we should find out what each person is passionate about.

ST: What insights can you share in how best to make technology more personable, more meaningful and more accessible to kids?

MR: The first thing is to make sure we think of technology in terms of a material that kids can do things with. Too often today, a lot of technology delivers something to the kid. I think too many technologies are trying to create an experience for kids or deliver information to kids. I’d rather think of technology as a material that kids can mold out of their imaginations into things. The more that you give kids control over the technology and allow kids to shape the direction of the technology then it becomes much easier to connect with their personal interests and passions. Giving kids the ability to shape, mold and direct technology allows everyone to shape the technology based on their own interests and passions. I’m always thinking about how we can make the technology in a way that kids are the ones who are deciding which ways to push it. Kids should be pushing the technology, the technology should not be pushing the kid.

ST: Do you find yourself in conversations with educators about the differences between Constructionism and Constructivism or Behaviorism or the learning approach teachers tend to use in class today?

MR: Yes, I certainly find myself in all those discussions.

First of all, the way I think about Piaget’s term Constructivism, the core idea to recognize is that learners build knowledge structures. Learning is an active process where learners are actively constructing knowledge based on their interactions with the world. In our minds we have lots of pieces of knowledge. Through our interaction with the world we’re actively making new connections and building our understanding. Building understanding is an active process where learners, through their interactions, are constantly constructing an understanding of the world. In a class of 30 students they are all going to be doing somewhat different constructions. It’s an ongoing active process.

Now Seymour Papert, who studied with and worked closely with Piaget, added to this concept with his term Constructionism. This idea says that one of the best ways to help people actively build their knowledge structures is to engage them in constructing things in the world. This can be thought of broadly. It might be constructing a tower out of wooden blocks, constructing a poem with words, or constructing a picture on the computer screen. Those are all ways of constructing in the world. When you talk about Constructionism, Seymour’s main point is that one of the best ways of building knowledge structures is by constructing things in the world. Whenever I construct things in the world, there is this constant feedback, back and forth, that helps me building new ideas. By building new ideas it gives me new ways of thinking about how to make things in the world. It’s this constant cycle of making things in the world, which enables me to make new ideas, which let’s me make new things in the world, which let’s me make new ideas. This is what I see Seymour saying with Constructionism.

I interpret Piaget’s Contructivism as more a theory of how people learn, where Seymour’s Constructionism is more of an approach to learning, it’s a strategy for education. I see them as somewhat different. It’s not that one replaces the other. Constructivism is more about the way people learn and Constructionism is more a suggested strategy, an educational approach, to help people learn.

As I look at the educational community, especially in the educational research community, over the last decade or so, everybody says they’re a Constructivists. Increasingly with teachers, they also say they’re Constructivists and that they’re drawing upon these ideas from Piaget. One thing that I sometimes find frustrating is that people often say they are Constructivists, but if you look at their practices, whether it’s the practice of a teacher in a classroom or the practice of a toy designer, or a media designer, their practices are totally at odds with what I think Constructivism is really about. I worry that it’s a buzz word being tossed around these days. I don’t think people really take it to heart in a serious way.

I should add that, although I feel I’m very influenced by and a strong believer of this Constructivist approach to learning and Seymour’s Constructionist strategies for education, it’s important to be up front about the fact that it’s not easy to carry out a Constructionists approach to learning or to set up an educational approach taking seriously Constructivist ideas. I think that’s one reason why they don’t get followed through as well as I would wish. It’s not that it’s easy to follow through on these approaches. To really respect individual learners and their learning styles and the ways that they go about constructing knowledge is a challenge. Although I think these ideas are very important, and I’m a deep believer in them, I’m also very aware that it’s a challenge to realize them.

ST: Where teachers and students are regularly tested for what they’ve learned within a week, within a month, I wonder if a Constructionists approach to learning can co-exist with all the testing that occurs in these assessment heavy days?

MR: I think it’s challenging. I think the role assessment plays in today’s classroom does make it more difficult to bring about the approach to education I would be most supportive of. I think assessment influences both what we’re helping students learn and how we’re helping students learn. First of all, some of the things I think are most important for students to learn aren’t easy to assess. If we need to have a very clear, often quantitative assessment of what students are learning, some things that I think are very important for students to be learning just don’t enter the classroom because we don’t have good ways of assessing them. But I don’t think that means we should give up on those things because they’re not easy to assess.

It’s a challenge. It is important to be accountable and to make sure what you’re doing is valued and is bringing about important change. I think it’s a dilemma.

Also, what is easiest to assess is knowledge of specific facts and specific skills. If those are the easiest things to assess then often times the curriculum drifts in that direction. If what you’re going to assess people on is specific facts and specific skills then drilling, practicing and memorizing can be a very effective way of achieving those results. Again, I don’t think that’s what the goal should be, but if that is what the goal is, then those approaches to education and learning could be effective. However, I do think this steers a lot of education away from what’s most important.

ST: Where did the inspiration for Scratch come from?

MR: A few different places. Partly it grew out of our long experience with our Computer Clubhouses. We started these after school centers for young people from low-income communities and specifically set them up for young people to learn to express themselves with new technologies.

One thing we found was that kids were very engaged with activities like designing with graphics and images. Photoshop became very popular and kids would grab images with a camera or they would scan an image and then they would put together someone’s head with someone else’s body and make all sorts of great images. But one thing we found was that it was much more difficult for Clubhouse members to create dynamic interactive projects, or to create interactive animations, or to create their own games. We thought that it was unfortunate that they couldn’t do this because a lot of them wanted to create interactive animations, interactive stories, and interactive games. They see a lot of this kind of creative work on the Internet and they want to create it as well, but they didn’t have good tools for doing it on their own. A lot of times they would see things online made with Flash, but Flash really wasn’t made for this audience. A lot of the young people would come into the Clubhouse thinking they could get started with Flash and then learn it was really hard for them to do the kinds things they wanted to do. The right tools didn’t exist out there for them to create what they wanted to create.

We also saw this as a missed learning opportunity. In the process of designing and creating interactive projects there are lots of opportunities for important learning experiences. We saw that there were two problems; kids couldn’t design what they wanted to design and there was this missed learning opportunity. The tools that are out there, like Flash, didn’t really seem to be serving the audience that we were most interested in.

Around this time another source of inspiration came to us through my interactions with Alan Kay. Alan is considered one of the grandfathers of the personal computer and the graphical user interface. He’s also been very interested in children’s learning. Alan had been working on a project called Etoys, which was built on top of a programming language his group had developed called Squeak. When I saw Etoys I was very inspired. It was a media manipulating authoring environment that allowed kids to manipulate media in creative ways.

As I looked at Etoys, I found it to be very exciting but didn’t really think it was going to work with the audience I had in mind. Using the experiences we had gathered over the years from the Computer Clubhouse, and drawing off of my work with Seymour Papert and his work with Logo, we imagined we could take some of the ideas from Alan Kay’s Etoys work and make it more accessible. We wanted to figure out how we could lower the floor and make it easier for kids to get started.

Also, from the beginning, we wanted to think about the community aspect of how people could share their projects with one another and how they could collaborate with one another. We thought this was going to be an important part of the learning process.

Using our experiences from the work of Seymour Papert and the work we had done with the Lego Company on the Lego Mindstorms product, we knew a lot about how to make a graphic programming language for kids. Rather than using this graphic programming language to control things in the physical world, as with Lego Mindstorms, the question became “How do we help kids control things on a screen and also let them share there creations?” That’s how we got started and those were our goals.

We were very lucky to receive a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on this project. We worked on what would become Scratch for about four years, trying out different things, constantly working with kids along the way to see what kids were interested in, what type of tools were intuitive for them, and what would they do with the tools we created. There are a variety of different aspects to the project. We built prototype after prototype to try out with kids and finally we publicly launched Scratch exactly one year ago. It’s been very exciting to have it out in the world and attracting a growing community.

ST: Can you tell me about Scratch’s journey since the moment you made the product available online?

MR: It had a rocky start at the very beginning because there was so much demand. On the first day our server crashed. We had a lot of learning to do in order to deal with the demand. But the problem was stabilized quickly and we’ve been able to support the community well since then.

The things I’m happiest with and most surprised about, I’ve been amazed by the sophistication of the projects that the people have done in Scratch. People created things that are beyond what I imagined could be created with the language we developed. It’s always exciting when you develop a piece of software and then people do things with it that you never imagined could be done with it. For example, people have made these incredibly accurate versions of old video games that are sophisticated in ways that I didn’t realize our software would be able to support. This level of sophistication is very impressive.

Even more so I’ve been impressed with and pleased by the diversity of projects kids have been created. From the beginning we knew we wanted to help kids make interactive games, interactive stories, interactive animations. Kids have found so many more creative ways of using the software and the related website.

Here’s one example that comes to mind. There’s a girl in England that instead of making a game, she just started to make some animated characters. She put these characters online with a message that said “I like making animated characters. Please feel free to use them in your stories or games. If you want a special character, just leave a message below and I’ll make it for you.” What she was doing was offering her consulting services on our website to make characters for others. So kids started asking her to make characters for their games and then they put their games online. Another kid offered their skills in making new features that could be added to a game. In several cases, kids would start their own online companies, the first one being a company called “Crank Inc.” which was a group of kids; one in England, one in Ireland, one in Russia and one in the United States. They started this company making games together where each member made different parts of the game.

Another great thing we saw was a project called the Scratch News Network, which was modeled after the Cable News Network. This project had a newscaster giving news about what was new on the Scratch website. As part of our own efforts running the Scratch website, we would feature certain projects on the Scratch home page. However, here was somebody who was giving a newscast of what in their opinion were the most important projects to be aware of on the website. The first time I saw this, my reaction was “Oh, that’s cute. Here’s a simulation of a newscast.” Then I stopped and realized that this was not a simulation of a newscast, this was a real newscast. It was just as much a newscast as is the evening news on CBS. It was created by someone to serve an audience by providing information about what was new in their community. This person wasn’t a fake newscaster or a simulated newscaster, this person was a real newscaster.

I mentioned that we feature certain projects on the Scratch home page. We also found a project that offered advice to the community on how to get your project featured on the home page. People are just using this tool in all sorts of different ways.

The level of collaboration with the Scratch community has also been exciting to see. Right now we’re up to about 130,000 projects on the Scratch website. [Author's note: In May 2008 there were 130,000 posted projects. In September 2008 there were over 200,000 posted projects.] Out of those 130,000 projects, more than 20,000 projects are what we call “remixes”, meaning that someone took someone else’s projects, added things to it and then uploaded it to the site as their own version.

In the early days of the website, this led to a lot of discussion. People would complain that someone else stole their project. We participated in these discussions and offered advice saying the Scratch community is a sharing community. That it was our intent that users be able to put things up on the website and encourage others to make use of it and extend it. We want kids to build upon each other’s work. That’s the way innovation comes, through people sharing their work. This discussion led to the design of new features on the Scratch site. Soon after we automated this remixing process to include information about who’s project it was based on and include a link back to the original project. Then people could trace back through a remixed project’s history to find out what projects it was based on. Our hope is to support this as the culture of the community such that people will feel pride in remixing, that you can see how many of your projects were remixed by others in the community.

ST: I remember reading in Laurence Lessig’s book Free Culture a quote he wrote that says “no future creation can exist without prior creation.” It seems that this concept easily transports to kids who are enamored by certain creative projects posted to the Scratch website and who have the ability to remix those projects.

I know from my own experiences when learning new software applications, people usually learn best by starting out with something that somebody else has already built and deconstruct that work. Instantly you jump in and learn something. You’re not thumbing through the manuals. It’s like you get a leg up by jumping into the world faster.

MR: Yes, it’s both that you can learn from the techniques other people use and be inspired by the possibilities. Both of those things happen when you look at these projects online.

I sometimes quote a line from Marvin Minsky, a professor here at MIT, and one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. When he was asked about the programming language Logo that made its way into schools in the 80’s, Marvin responded by saying that “It was a nice grammar, but there’s no literature.” By this he meant that it’s a nice programming language but there wasn’t any compelling literature to inspire you. When we learn to read, part of the reason that we learn to read and write is because we’ve read other literature and we’re inspired by what we’ve read. Children grow up reading children’s books and they see great literature and it inspires them to want to read and write. In Marvin’s words, with Logo you never saw that. What we’re hoping to do with Scratch is provide tools for great literature to be created, which in turn will help others be inspired by those works.

ST: Are there challenges you see in getting teachers to use Scratch?

MR: I see that there are challenges along several dimensions.

One is that Scratch doesn’t fit so naturally into the existing curriculum. It’s not the type of activity where you can say this is going to help students learn concept X that is part of standard Y. It doesn’t fit that neatly into existing curriculum.

The second thing that makes it difficult is that in order to get the most out of Scratch it requires someone spending time getting to know the product, in a supportive environment. It’s not as simple as just booting it up and you’ll know everything about it. Some of the most important aspects of Scratch take some time and effort to learn. Providing teachers with the appropriate support to help them learn to make the most out of Scratch, not just the technical details, is certainly a big challenge.

How teachers can fit Scratch into their existing classroom activities is another challenge.

There are a few ways that I do see Scratch getting into schools. The easiest fit for Scratch is related to programming-related studies, which can be an important part of any middle school technology or high school computer-science curriculum.

Another way that Scratch is being used is in a similar manner to Powerpoint. Powerpoint is used as a general presentation tool. Whether students are doing a report on the rainforest of Costa Rica or doing a report on the presidents of the United States they might make a presentation using Powerpoint. Scratch can also be used as a presentation tool, and I think its abilities go beyond Powerpoint. First of all, you can make richer dynamic projects. It can be expanded beyond the standard image displays and bullet points of text often found in a typical Powerpoint presentation. I also think Scratch allows users to be more expressive with a richer learning experience. Teachers appreciate that, and once they become familiar with Scratch, they’ll start to use it as a tool with students for a wide range of activities. From the early adopter teachers using Scratch, there are great things happening in their classrooms.

ST: Is Scratch being used internationally?

MR: Yes. Scratch has a very big following in the United Kingdom partly because we received a lot of press coverage by the BBC. The word spread well there. It’s also being used in many different places around the world.

In the early days of Scratch, English was the primary language built into the product, so that constrained who could use it. We’ve gradually been expanding the software to include a wider range of languages. Today there’s a menu where you can choose from more than a dozen languages. There are still a few constraints. It doesn’t convert everything on the interface perfectly. Scratch initially was built to support Latin characters and characters that are in English. It doesn’t support Japanese or Chinese or Indian dialects yet.

This summer we’re coming up with a new version of Scratch that will support a number of additional languages, like Hebrew, where you read from right to left. It’s our intent that Scratch will support a much wider range of characters and the entire interface will be supported in the conversion. We’re working on getting both the website as well as the application to support more languages. Internationalization is of interest to us because we currently have users from dozens of countries around the world.

Initially we put out a call on one of the discussion boards asking people to help translate the site and we heard from lots of volunteers. Basically we sent these volunteers a spreadsheet with all of the English words in it and they just filled in the words from their language.

ST: Do you see Scratch having an equal appeal to girls as well as boys?

MR: This was certainly something we were aiming for from the very beginning. We’ve seen a lot of interest across genders. It was important to our design group that we support and encourage a wide range of projects because users have such a diverse set of interests. We didn’t want Scratch to become just a game site. In some ways it’s easy to say Scratch is great for making games, and it is great for making games, but we were worried that this would become a self-reinforcing message and could potentially turn off some of our intended audience. We’ve made an effort to provide a wide variety of projects and that approach has helped us keep a variety of people with different backgrounds interested. I don’t know what the exact percentages are, though there are more boys than girls on the site. But when we did the analysis, girls posted just as many projects on the website as do boys. They are equally active participants. We would like to improve the numbers some because it isn’t quite balanced right now.

One user’s story that speaks to diverse interests is that of one 14 year old from New Jersey who made one of the most popular projects on the Scratch site. We spoke with him and his parents. His mother referred to him as a theatre geek. He had never really done much on a computer but he loved the theatre. Scratch was his way of getting involved creating on a computer. We really like this story because we wanted to make Scratch appeal to a wide range of kids, to not just the math-science types at schools, but theatre kids and many others as well. We’re very happy that we’ve been appealing to kids with a wide range of different backgrounds.

ST: In reading through some of your published research, you describe the Digital Divide as something that’s not just tied to issues of computer access, but also issues of fluency. Could you discuss how Scratch addresses issues of fluency to help minimize the Digital Divide?

MR: The good news is the Digital Divide will narrow over time. It is already narrowing and will continue to narrow due to the rapidly declining costs of technology. I think this makes new technology more accessible to a wider range of people. There are still barriers to entry due to cost, but new technologies are becoming more widespread than have been in the past.

What I worry about is a future where everyone has access to technology but people simply use technology as a consumer. That all they’re doing is pointing, clicking and chatting. Other users will be able to design, create and invent with new technologies. That’s where there’s the risk of having a divide between those who quick browse and chat and those who design, create and invent.

In my mind there’s going to be a much richer learning experience for people who are able to design, create and invent. It will better prepare these users to be better participants in the society of the future. I think by providing tools like Scratch we’re providing opportunities for young people to grow up designing, creating and inventing so they are better prepared to be full participants in tomorrow’s society where they’re really able to use the technology to express themselves and explore things in new ways.

ST: Can you share any insights into kids’ social interactions that could lead to better online learning outcomes?

MR: The thing that’s really important to us is creating a respectful environment and a culture of respect. Not simply because we want kids to learn to be polite to each other, but because we want kids to take risks when creating and designing. If you’re part of a community where people are making insulting comments based on something that you’ve created, then you’re not going to try out new things and you’re not going to take risks. If you create something new and somebody makes an insulting comment about it you’re not going to take risks again. We think it’s really important for kids to take risks and to try new things and it’s only going to work if they are part of a respectful community. We have put a really high priority on is how can we create a community of respect.

We put a lot of emphasis on a community of respect when we were creating our after school Computer Clubhouses. There are a lot of challenges in creating an environment of respect in an after school center and we learned a lot by doing so. There’s lots more we have to learn in creating a similar community of respect in an online environment. Online we’re not working directly with the kids. They can be anonymous, we don’t know who they are, we don’t know things about their background. If we’re working directly with kids in the same room, we learn more about them and we’re able to find the appropriate feedback that will help cultivate an environment of respect. It’s tough to create that environment, but once you get a mass of the community to behave in a certain way, it soon becomes the norm. It then becomes easier to perpetuate it. This is an important goal for all online communities to establish. If online communities are concerned with the development of children’s learning, then a culture of respect is critically important.