Last year I wrote about a tech toy product called Hyper Dash developed by the toy company Wild Planet. Hyper Dash is an electronic game that allows one user to hide up to five hockey puck sized targets, indoors or out, and another person can search for these targets with the help of a talking controller. I thought this was a brilliant use of RFID, a technology that relies on small paper thin microchips that can be detected within short distances via the radio frequencies they emit. (So when will this technology become standard in all car keys? Imagine the time we could all save each morning trying to find them!)

This coming fall Wild Planet will release a new iteration of this technology enhanced play pattern specifically for preschoolers. The product will be called Animal Scramble and it relies uses the same technology, but will support a hide-and-seek learning play pattern using plastic animal characters. The talking controller is a giraffe and the small targets include a monkey, a parrot, an elephant and a tiger. The giraffe calls out different challenges for one or many different players to accomplish, like tag the animal that has stripes, or find the animal that begins with the letter “M”. The animals can be spread out across a living room, backyard, or even a larger space for more exercise.

While Animal Scramble and Hyper Dash are great uses of RFID technology, it feels like RFID is inching along when it comes to being used in new and original ways. I keep waiting to see breakthrough applications that rely on the technology but am surprised at how few new products take advantage of its possibilities.

The only other child-focused RFID product I’ve seen so far this year includes a child alarm system developed by Smart Target called Kiddo. This product sounds an alarm when a child or even a pet you’re watching (or maybe not watching) equipped with an RFID tag moves outside of a designated play area.

Immediately I see how this technology can be used in all the clothes I drop off at the dry cleaner, important books I wish to keep on a designated bookshelf, picking up luggage at the airport, and did I mention the part about car keys?

So today I’d like to congratulate Wild Planet for pushing the RFID envelope. Many more play patterns are yet to be discovered. I look forward to this space heating up. Thank you for leading the charge!

On August 7, 2007, Georgia Tech professor and video game designer, researcher, and critic, Dr. Ian Bogost appeared on The Colbert Report to discuss how video games can be used to influence and change social and political thinking. Bogost has a new book out called Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games published by MIT Press. You can also visit Bogost’s popular website called Water Cooler Games where he discusses, reviews, and analyzes video games that have an agenda. Click this video link to see Bogost on The Colbert Report.

June has been a busy month with conferences and events. There are many newsworthy items to report. Among them is my recent visit to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Game Jam event held recently outside of Boston. This gathering of developers, programmers, and a few artists and teachers, was for the benefit of creating learning games to be used on the latest XO laptop (what the OLPC device is often called.) While I could only attend the opening night of this weekend long event, I finally had my chance to test out this new machine. Many details about the XO can be learned from the OLPC website and from an independent OLPC news source called OLPC News. Here are my first impressions of the B3 (Beta 3 XO laptop) device:

• The laptop is much lighter in weight and smaller in size than I expected. Opening up the folded laptop was initially hard to do. The little green network “ears” on the machine need to be rotated out of their holding position in order to unlock and open up the laptop. Once you have the monitor up and the laptop open, you also notice that the monitor pivots on the vertical axis so that the monitor can be flipped around and folded back into the computer, just like a tablet PC laptop.
  
  
• As I had heard from many others and saw for myself, the monitor is really impressive. It’s screen is very crisp and easy to read.
  
  
• Next, a closer look at the keyboard: Yes, the QWERTY keyboard was a little small, but ergonomically a great fit for young hands. These smart laptop designers have done what no other computer manufacturer has been able to do to date. They have removed the caps lock key. (Finally!) There are also a number of navigation buttons in the top row of keys. These keys allow the user to quickly move around the operating system.
  
  
• I wanted to see if it was true that an SD slot could be found on the device. (You know, one of those slots where you insert a tiny card into a digital camera, for example, in order to save your digital photos.) Well, indeed, a slot can be found just under the bottom right of the monitor. This SD slot can be used for creating backups of important files, but I’ve also learned that someday a version of Windows could be used through this slot. In an interview with an Argentina news group posted on YouTube , Nicholas Negroponte states this slot was included mostly for the benefit of Microsoft (look at section 4:20 – 4:47).
  
  
• What surprised me the most about the user interface was the gaming controls at the bottom left and right of the monitor, just below the built-in speakers. Yes! Gaming controls! (Why hadn’t I seen them earlier in the press photos?): A “D-pad” on the left side of the monitor and shape buttons (triangle, circle, square and “X”) just like those found on a Sony Playstation controller on the right. (See image below.) The development language for the laptop is an open source subset of Python called Pygame. The way in which one accesse these game controls were not specifically called out during the Game Jam event, but for an overview of how to develop games in Pygame for OLPC, see this video.)

Overall, the laptop left me very impressed. There are a number of small rough edges to smooth out, but it’s amazing to see just how far this OLPC machine has come.

Later in the day after seeing technology expert Robin Raskin speak as mentioned in my prior post, I received news that Ben Sawyer, pioneer in the Serious Games movement and founder of the company Digital Mill, would be speaking at MIT. Little did I know the presentation he was about to deliver was a preview of new material for the upcoming USC Annenberg Workshop on Games for Learning.

Ben began the presentation with a very fitting poem by John Godfrey Saxe about six blind men who went to see an elephant. Each blind man found a part of the elephant; it’s sturdy side by one, a tusk by another, an ear by yet another, and so on. Each blind man thought they had come to understand the true meaning of what an elephant is. Each person was partially right about what they thought was an elephant, yet all of them were wrong in their understanding.

I found this poem helpful in describing my early frustration with Serious Games. I consider myself part of the learning games community; Yet, as I read through the serious games online posts and meet other community members outside of my space, like in corporate training or the military, I’ve asked myself many times, are we really working towards the same common goal? Do we see the same elephant? After hearing this poem I’ve felt a sense of deja-vu, having been in the same place maybe fifteen years prior as multimedia and the interactive industry tried to define itself as a new business worth pursuing. Now that we can better classify different parts of that earlier beast, and see and understand the whole as well as its parts, we begin the process again, unfolding this new chapter in the digital domain.

Ben unveiled his taxonomy of Serious Games, a matrix that attempts to define the different parts of this industry (Click to download an Excel copy of the Serious Games Taxonomy). When speaking with Ben after his presentation, he mentioned how this taxonomy is indeed a work in progress, that this information not only had a height and width, but a depth that’s not reflected here. In discussing this early version with others, a few holes and additional serious games classifications appear to be missing. None the less, this effort is an excellent first mapping of the field.

After seeing this Serious Games Taxonomy, I can more easily see where communication breakdown occurs. I can also see the differences and similarities of my own company in context to others. I think we can now begin to see the whole elephant and are on our way to more meaningful dialog about the differences between a trunk and a tail.

My company, 360KID, watches over trends in the kids’ space very closely; it’s one of the things we do best. We know our end users, and we follow the research that helps support new trends yet to be pioneered. 360KID also keeps a close eye on technology, gaming, education, and generational trends because what happens in these additional areas also has an impact on children’s lives. What trends are we currently watching and projecting five years out? Specific trends in the technology space include: social networking, toys, video games, education, and computing.

Social networking sites are currently the biggest and hottest trend for kids today. They’re great destinations for growing virtual communities. A few of the most popular online destinations include Club Penguin, Star Doll, Barbie Girls, Webkinz, and Runescape to name a few. As social networking services and products continue to evolve, and specific kid-focused enterprises use social networking technologies as a powerful tween connector, new social networking capabilities yet discovered will be combined to create even more engaging, lasting, and sticky experiences for kids. Currently, social networking is confined to a computer/Internet experience, but it could be possible for this form of entertainment to migrate to cell phones. More than 27% of kids ages 8 – 12 have their own cell phone. That number is expected to double by 2010. However, due to a lack of cell phone technology standards within the US, social networking technologies may not become commonplace on all cell phones unless the technology landscape shifts. For example, if the FCC made analog television signals available for non-emergency network uses through wireless everywhere initiatives, this could ultimately benefit not just computer experiences, but also cell phones and other tech devices.

The toy industry within the US will continue to hover at the $22 billion mark in the years ahead, but what will change is one specific segment of the toy industry, that being the youth electronics category. This year the NPD Group, a leading research firm in the video game and toy industries, projected a 23% growth in youth electronics. (Youth electronics is just one of 11 different “supercategories” in the toy space. Other supercategories include action figures, arts & crafts, dolls, vehicles, etc.) Many experts in the toy industries, as well as the electronics world, believe the toy industry is transforming into its own unique consumer electronics industry. While it’s expected that many popular technology toy products like digital games and plug-and-play TV toy devices will continue to deliver their “toy” magic, microprocessors are finding their way into My Little Pony dolls, Hot Wheels toys and many other traditional, non-technical toy products. Those in the toy industry often refer to Moore’s Law, the idea that microprocessors double in computer processing power every 24 months, as being on steroids in the toy space. An “echo” of this law, starting with the oldest and cheapest microprocessors, is working its way into everyday technology kids use every day.

Another technology trend that will have significant impact on computing, technology toys and technology used in the classroom is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative, sometimes referred to as the $100 laptop. This has been spearheaded by Nicholas Negroponte at MIT’s Media Lab. The goal of OLPC is to put a low cost laptop in the hands of every child on the planet for educational purposes (every child that is except those found within the US.) The number of laptops OLPC wishes to give away is 150 million units. By this coming fall season, the first 3 – 5 million, low cost laptops (averaging $175 per unit) will begin shipping to early adopter countries around the globe. Even if the OLPC initiative only partially succeeds, its boldness is forcing many companies (Microsoft with the Student Innovation Suite, Intel with the Classmate PC, Dell, Gateway and others), institutions (US Department of Education and other education institutions and ministries around the globe), and even toy companies to rethink everything. For example:

• Will OLPC create consumer demand for powerful computers that cost less than $100?
• Since education within the US is in drastic need of an overhaul, how will the constructionist learning approach surrounding OLPC laptops influence the institutionalized instructivist conversation within the US?
• Since OLPC is an open platform relying primarily on an open source operating system and software, how will this influence consumer-based operating systems and consumer software as we know it?
• If a reasonably powerful computer can be created for $100, can an electronic toy manufacturers create a powerful toy computer for $50? Could there someday be such a thing as Winnie the Pooh’s first computer that’s affordable and actually works like a real networked computer?

The video games industry, and specifically momentum currently being experienced in the Learning Games or Serious Games sector of the video games industry, is an important trend to follow. Many noteworthy academics and consumer video games experts are all exploring video games as a vehicle for learning. While great strides have been achieved in the last three years, this movement is still relatively young in it’s history. What’s exciting to watch is the number of video game companies exploring new ways to deliver learning messages and educational content. What is learned in this specific video game sector has great implications about what kinds of learning material might more easily be learned in the future. And as kids young and old spend more time playing video games with every passing year, this movement suggests how future tech savvy youngsters might be spending their free time.

The education sector continues to feel accountability pressure from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate. Even if this mandate is not reauthorized this year, 33% of the teacher work force (aging baby boomers) are planning to retire within 5 years, and the attrition rate for new teachers continues at its current level of 50% within 5 years for all new teachers. If these two trends are combined with the small projected spike coming in the student population, class sizes will grow as the availability of experienced teachers shrinks significantly.

In order for teachers to help each of their own students learn according to their own individualized needs, technology in the classroom will prove to be an essential component of everyday instruction. Future products will not just provide individual, classroom, school and district wide achievement data, but it will also allow for a level of customization and individualized instruction that is badly needed in today’s education environment.

One thing becomes clear when developing innovative and creative ways to engage kids. Kids have always been the same. Throughout the years. Throughout the decades. Throughout all time. It’s the society around kids that changes constantly. Changes in communication, government, education, places of worship, healthcare all have an impact on the experience of childhood. Watching these and many other trends is one of the best ways to create products that can really make a difference in every child’s life.