Muppets may never age, but they can still keep up with the times.
In late September, Sesame Workshop, the non-profit educational arm of the long-running children's TV series Sesame Street, launched Little Discoverers, a new "digital destination" for children and parents to engage in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
With support from CA Technologies, the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation, the initiative aims to make the most of early childhood experiences with STEM through games, interactive videos, and even hands-on activities and science experiments.
"There is a pressing need to improve STEM education in the United States to better prepare students to enter related fields," says Michelle Newman-Kaplan, assistant director of content in the Curriculum & Content group at Sesame Workshop.
"We strive to introduce STEM education and exploration early to build a foundation for these skills
"We strive to introduce STEM education and exploration early to build a foundation for these skills, and create a lifelong love of STEM learning."
Countries around the world continue to outrank the United States in innovation and STEM proficiency. According to the National Math and Science Initiative and the National Report on the Condition of College & Career Readiness, 69% of high school graduates were unprepared for college-level science courses in 2012, and 54% of high school graduates were not ready for college-level math.
According to Code.org, more than 1.4 million computer jobs will be in demand by 2020, but only 400,000 students will study computer science in college. There are also severe racial and gender disparities [PDF] in STEM — in both education and professional employment.
Several organizations, such as Black Girls Code, as well as educational institutions around the country are trying to make STEM a more accessible and natural discipline. Sesame Workshop is joining the ranks.
Image: Sesame Workshop
When you first visit the Little Discoverers page, dubbed the Discovery Center, the intro video shows characters Elmo and Abby Cadabby playing "investigators," trying to "find out more about things." Each topic in the Discovery Center contains a collection of videos, a web game, a mobile game and printable activities.
Children and adults alike will instantly find themselves having fun while learning — something inherent in the Sesame Street brand itself.
Sesame Workshop has created STEM content for both TV and online for years, but it didn’t have a digital destination to house and curate that content until now. Newman-Kaplan, who also works on digital offerings for PBS' The Electric Company, develops games across multiple platforms, including the web, mobile devices, Nintendo Wii and DS, Microsoft Kinect, and others.
Through her role in the company, Newman-Kaplan partners with producers and researchers to create the educational digital content for children ages 2-9 (Little Discoverers, specifically, is tailored for ages 3-5). She creates the curricula, working with producers to build UIs that are appropriate for each curriculum, platform and target age demographic.
She started working on a literature review for Little Discoverers over two years ago, and development began in 2012. The project officially launched Sept. 24.
"
Little Discoverers grew from a desire to have our STEM content accessible in one place
Little Discoverers grew from a desire to have our STEM content accessible in one place," Newman-Kaplan tells Mashable, "and to provide children, caregivers and preschool educators with the tools they need to engage in STEM exploration and learning together, in everyday moments at home and in classrooms."
Once Sesame Workshop began curating STEM content into different topic areas — Experiments, Sink or Float, Measurement, Properties of Matter, Force and Motion, and Engineering — the team figured out which types of games, videos and activity guides to produce.
With support from its funders, Sesame Workshop created the Little Discoverers website with 26 new videos starring Elmo and Abby, six mobile games, three desktop games, six educator guides and six parent newsletters.
"Working on STEM curriculum for preschool children is a fun challenge," Newman-Kaplan says. "We are constantly figuring out how to present complex concepts to young children in age-appropriate ways. Luckily we have some wonderful advisors to help us."
The Content & Curriculum group went through several rounds of formative testing, conducting focus groups with parents and educators to help with content and design, and presenting preschoolers with games to make sure they understood what to do.
Though Newman-Kaplan believes it's too early to tell what kind of traffic Little Discoverers attracts, she believes that such digital learning tools are a move in the right direction.
"Children are being presented with more interactive content than ever before, and digital games can be powerful and engaging learning tools," she says. "As children make choices in games and receive feedback based on their input, they are empowered to actively explore educational content in new and exciting ways."
0 comments:
Post a Comment