A few years ago my father was in hospice care during the last days of his life. Over the span of a couple of weeks his ability to communicate deteriorated rapidly. Not that he couldn’t communicate completely, but a number of barriers prevented his ability to communicate easily. Among them, not having enough energy to speak, or coughing fits in the middle of speaking. Nurses that came and went, as wonderful as they were, often did not speak English as a first language, which also made it hard for him to communicate.

At the time when all of this was happening, I was reflecting on how very young children who have not yet learned how to speak would just use a finger to point to things they wanted. The same is true for a young child using an iPhone, all they need to do is point or swipe. Why is it that using an iPhone or an iPad is so easy for a twelve month old child? In the research world there’s a concept called “cognitive load”. In the context of computing, if you make a user interface easy to use then there are less barriers, less cognitive demands on simply using a computer and more cognitive resources available to take advantage of what you wish to accomplish with a computer. In the context of hospice care and communication there are things a person needs to effectively communicate that have nothing to do with the actual message. For example, having enough energy to speak, the ability to breathe easily, or having minimal muscle coordination, or the ability to use your tongue or larynx. If a person has a message to share with others, the components of communicating like those just mentioned can become barriers for the successful delivery of that message.

Sample page of a two-page communication tool for helping hospice patients communicate. (Click image to see larger version and instructions for saving. Version for women also included.)

After a few days of watching my father struggle to be understood I created a paper-based way for him to get his messages across. A thick piece of paper, on each side containing many pictures of things he would ask for in the course of a day. All he would need to do is point to what he wanted on these two pages. Having the ability to communicate by pointing removed the cognitive demands of being able to communicate through talking. Many items on these pages related to his need to be comfortable, moving from bed to couch, then bathroom and back to the bed. I noted a number of hand gestures shared between my mother and father, mostly shorthand for yes or no, good or bad. Also a limited set of preferred food choices, particularly ice chips. Sometimes just water, sometimes juice. This two-sided paper communication tool was easy for my father to use, pointing to what he wanted in times of challenged communication. I made it for him on a Tuesday. He passed away on Thursday. In that short time it helped reduce the frustration of communicating only a handful of times, but it did help.

Second page of a two-page communication tool for helping hospice patients communicate. (Click image to see larger version and instructions for saving. Kosher verson also included.)

Recently another family member started hospice, I’ll call her Mary. Many of the same communication struggles I saw with my father can be seen with Mary, except Mary has less energy and less motor skill coordination than my father. My father had enough energy to point to areas of this two-sided paper tool. Mary does not. While Mary may not have the muscle coordination to use her hands, she does seem to have greater control of her head movements. I started thinking how such a communication tool could be used and thought maybe these pages could be enlarged, printed on a large poster board, and attached to a nearby wall at eye level from sitting upright on a bed. Then a laser pointer could be fixed to a hat, allowing the beam of light to point to items on the poster board Mary might need.

I wish to share what I have learned, along with these communication pages, hoping it can help others. If you would like a copy of these files to print out and use yourself, you can save each individual JPG file by clicking on the images above and read the instructions provided at the top of each page. Both male and female versions are available, including a kosher version for the food page. If you have an iPad or some other similar tablet, one easy way to use these files is to download them from a browser and save the files to a photo application on your device for quick access, removing the need to print.

I know every hospice situation is unique, mine is not the only story. If you have observations of your own about other successful ideas to make communication easier, or other common items requested from an ailing relative in hospice, please do share in the comments below.

[Note: this is an excerpt from the upcoming October 2012 issue of Children’s Technology Review.].

When it comes to apps that actively engage young children, one of the companies with products on every list is Duck Duck Moose Design. This three person studio — funny name and all – was one of the first to the children’s app scene, with an app called Wheels on the Bus.

Duck Duck Moose is a three person start-up based in San Mateo, CA. It launched it’s first app in 2009; today there are 14 DDM titles, collectively accounting for about 2.4 million paid downloads (publisher numbers).

On September 26, 2012, Duck Duck Moose announced it will be changing and expanding it’s business, with a $7 million investment from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Stanford University. This type of investment raises questions that every small publisher hopes to deal with. “What do we do with lots of money?” “Is it possible to grow in a smart way, and keep the focus on quality?” And more importantly, “is this type of investment, and the constraints that come with it, a blessing or a curse?”

Of course, only time will tell. But we can say one thing for sure — Duck Duck Moose Design is once again charting new ground, as one of the first small mom-and-pop app publishers to get a big investment. Many other small children’s app publishers will be watching from the sidelines with great interest to see how this cash infusion will affect their work.

(Duck Duck Moose Founders Nicci Grabiel, Caroline Hu Flexer, and Michael Flexer)

A full interview with DDM co-founder Caroline Hu Flexer will appear in the October issue of Children’s Technology Review. In anticipation of that issue’s release, here are a few questions from the full interview to come.

Scott Traylor: Tell me about the first app you developed.

Caroline Hu Flexer: As a hobby, we started designing the Wheels on the Bus app for our own child. My husband Michael, and our good friend Nicci Gabriel worked on developing the app part-time over a three month period. We all had other full-time jobs. We launched that app in 2009. Later that year we won a KAPi Award, our first children’s industry award, and that was the beginning. That’s when we realized that maybe this could become a business. Wheels on the Bus continues to sell three-and-a-half years after it’s launch, and it’s still in the top charts. It wasn’t until 2010 that Nicci and I started working full-time. Michael started full time in 2011. It was just the three of us up until early this year. Recently our good friend, Jesse Ambrose, a founding engineer at Siebel Systems with my husband Michael, joined our team full-time. The four of us basically created the first 11 titles. Today we’re a team of nine, including the three founders.

ST: How has your thinking changed about developing apps for kids since you started?

CHF: The core of it hasn’t changed. We’ve always put kids at the center of what we do, but we’re always learning different things with each app and with different ages we may be targeting. We’ve done a lot of different types of apps. We started with toddler apps, like The Wheels on the Bus, which had one or two things for a young child to focus on. We didn’t want our apps to be over-stimulating, to have too many things going on at the same time. From a developmental perspective, we wanted our apps for toddlers to have simple interactions, whereas as we develop for older children, our apps have been more open-ended and have evolved into more layered interactions. One example for older children is our Draw and Tell app, where children make their own drawings, record their own voices, and create their own story. It’s a very different approach to the interaction.

ST: While there are many more big companies with big brands going into the children’s app business, would you say big business has seen big success from those efforts?

CHF: There have been some successes. It’s still rare to find interesting new content. There are a lot of big children’s media companies that have good apps and include characters that really appeal to children, but I think it’s a very unique time where we can invent new experiences using new characters because it’s a new platform. We’re able to do something really creative, and I think that’s a pretty rare opportunity. There are not that many companies creating their own original story lines and characters. It’s much more fun to invent something new, and it’s a better business model for us too.

(The first children’s app from Duck Duck Moose called Wheels on the Bus)

[The following is an article I wrote for the August 2012 issue of Children’s Technology Review.]

Last month, 18, 000+ tech-loving educators gathered at the San Diego convention center for ISTE — an annual event that has become the Mecca of ed tech in the United States. Also known as the International Society for Technology in Education, the four day event always starts with an opening keynote address — this year the headliner was Sir Ken Robinson, the English futurist.

But I wasn’t going to be there.

Due to family commitments I needed to miss the first day, and Sir Ken’s talk. So, I did what any valid data cruncher would do. I started collecting and analyzing the tweets from the one hour event. What I discovered was fascinating. The “big ideas” aren’t necessarily what comes from the podium. If you don’t believe me, you can watch the presentation yourself, (jump to 32:27 to see the keynote). The best ideas are the ones that are heard by a massive audience — collectively chewed and digested, and then captured in a collective mass of about 2, 500 tweets, under a single hashtag (#iste12). It’s as if Sir Ken were talking to a giant brain comprised of 750 busy tweeters, waiting to pounce on the next nugget.

Listening carefully to this brain at work taught me that trying to paraphrase Sir Ken based on Twitter information is a little like playing the telephone game, where you pass a secret phrase around a circle, only to end up with a different result at the end. Each spoken line from the original keynote was tweeted and re-tweeted at least 20 times, complete with some minor edits. I picked out, and in some cases merged together, some of the best tweets from the event. If you can forgive some editorial sanding, here’s what seemed to resonate:

“No Child Left Behind is proof that Americans get irony. No Child Left Behind should be renamed to be millions of children left behind.”

“If we know anything about children it is that they are not standardized. Yet we have a suffocating culture of standardization and we need just the opposite. Humanity is based on the principle of diversity, yet our education system is based on compliance and conformity. Our lives are not linear, they are organic, and school is based on linearity.”

“One-third of all students drop out of high school. If doctors lost 1/3rd of their patients it would be unacceptable. If 1/3rd of airplanes dropped out of the sky there would be an uproar. Yet this is the reality in education.”

“There are opportunities to personalize education. And while we may not be able to afford personalization, we can’t afford not to.”

“People on the planet today have more access to mobile devices than safe drinking water.”

“What will it take to truly engage students in their own education, and what role does technology play in this?”

These are inspiring and somewhat depressing words, but they were what this particular audience decided to capture. It seems that many educators view the US education system to be a flawed, broken process, and that the Department of Education doesn’t have much to add to the conversation. During the lengthy live and prerecorded statements made by DOE personalities Karen Cator and Arnie Duncan, a brief moment of Twitter praise came when Karen Cator’s comment “your work matters” was retweeted by many. However, the overall tone from the twittersphere during the DOE remarks was more snarky than pleased.

Was there any gold in the twitter stream? Sir Ken did challenge the audience to engage each student in a unique way, to empower the abilities of the individual, for the benefit of all mankind. The tweet read like this: “Great teachers don’t take students to a destination. They give them the tools to get there on their own.” Certainly this is a strong tweet from a smart crowd, and it is a good closing thought.

Casual Connect is an annual conference in the US that explores the business and development of casual games. This conference also travels to Europe and Singapore. This year’s US event recently held in Seattle, had a day long track focused on Children & Family Entertainment. 360KID CEO Scott Traylor was asked to deliver a presentation on trends and best practices for developing learning games. The video below is a recording of his talk called “Technology, Kids, & Learning: The Future and the Opportunities”.

Links to specific research cited in this presentation are listed below.

Do you need help developing a learning game for the classroom or just need some advice for creating a consumer-based learning game? Be it online, offline, electronic toy, iOS or Andriod, give us a call.

• PDF of this presentation
• Cooney Center – iLearn II Report
• Common Sense Media – Zero to Eight Report: Children’s Media Use in America
• Distimo App Store Report, May 2012
• US Toy Sales 2002 – 2011, NPD, TIA
• ESA Essential Facts 2012 – US Video Games Sales
• Complete K-12 Report 2012 by Education Market Research – 2011/2012 US sales (paid)
• Mapping a Personalized Learning Journey, Project Tomorrow
• Calif. Governor Sets Plans to Offer Open Source Digital Textbooks – EdWeek Article, May 2009
• Matrix One Tablet
• Beyond Barbie and Mortal Combat, Chapter 18. 2008, Carrie Heeter, Brian Winn
• A Code of Ethics for the Publishers of Interactive Media for Children
• Apple’s 3rd Quarter Earnings Conference Call, July 24, 2012 – Apple Insider
• NMC Horizon Report 2012, K-12 Edition

[Wendy Smolen is a contributing writer to the KidScreen blog. She is also a friend and the co-founder of the annual children’s conference called Sandbox Summit. Wendy asked if I would share some thoughts with her regarding the latest Sandbox Summit event held at MIT. Originally published to the KidScreen blog on April 25, 2012.]

Scott Traylor, Chief Kid at 360KID, had the daunting job of taping the recent Sandbox Summit@MIT, Going Mobile, Going Global, Tracking the anywhere/everywhere state of play. While this gave him a front and center seat, it also meant he had to listen to every word (no bathroom breaks!) I asked him to comment on a few of his favorite presentations.

Generally I find conferences don’t provide a helpful starting point about how kids are changing. Not so here. Allison Arling’s presentation from The Intelligence Group covered uncounted aspects of generational preferences with Gen Y and Gen Z. I found myself nodding in agreement as she communicated subtle differences in media consumption, messaging that resonates with a generation, and triggers for engagement across generational divides that can make or break any media plan. Clear, crisp, exact. (Or whatever.)

Allison’s presentation provided the scaffolding used by many of the other speakers. On day two, Jane Gould of Nickelodeon delivered a resounding kids’ media data punch . Jane always has access to great info, and she’s willing to share! Ever wonder what apps are most popular with kids, and why? What kinds of media do kids consume on tablets? What barriers will prevent media consumption on a tablet but not on television? What is consumption like on non-Apple devices? The answers were startling and maybe the most detailed and in-depth I’ve seen in the mobile/tablet/apps space ever. Jane made understanding the drivers of mobile media consumption a no-brainer.

Gaming and learning was a common thread in conversations both inside and outside the auditorium. Eric Zimmerman, game designer and industry thought leader, challenged us to rethink long-standing assumptions about learning games. Eric delivered one media mind bomb after another, the biggest being why educators challenge the value and potential for learning in games at all. Why is this one tool for creative expression challenged more than others? Why is it so many in education, as well as in business, wish to “gamify” learning? Should we have similar concerns about books in learning? Should we “bookify” learning? That’s crazy talk, and so is the current conversation about the potential games have to teach. Books are just one element of learning, why aren’t games?

These are just three small samples of a larger conversation. There’s no way I can do justice to all the intriguing thoughts each presenter brought to the conversation over the two days. If you missed attending this event, watch one—or all—of the videos here. You’ll be as amazed as I was at what you‘ll learn.

Disclosure: Scott Traylor is the founder of 360KID, a children’s interactive media company. Scott is also on the Board of Advisors for the Sandbox Summit. He captured the video being shared in this article’s links.