Nice piece in EdSurge by Sara DeWitt, with nice call out to our Curious George Busy Day.
Category: CURIOUS GEORGE
Sara DeWitt talks about our work on the Ruff Ruffman Show and Curious George Busy Day in “Why some screen time can actually be good for kids” in Axios.
Bill writes about our camera and AR work on FETCH, Curious George, Martha Speaks and Plum Landing in Kidscreen.
Here are some of our error pages – as even mistakes can be fun.
Shhh. Our new Secret Agent George game helps kids learn about the five senses. This furtive HTML5 game was quietly assembled at an undisclosed location by Gentry, Dennis and Jeff with help from Mike A and Amy.
Our dynamic web site for Design Squad Nation is nominated again for an EMMY – having already won before.
Congratulations to all involved, at to our GBH colleagues for Arthur, Martha Speaks and Curious George nominations and to our many friends in the PBS KIDS system for theirs.
Bill spoke as keynote at ITK 2014, Finland’s biggest tech/ed conference. Following the Finnish Minster of Education – extolling Finland’s growing cloud-based educational services – Bill offered a digital ‘postcard from America’ and spoke about politics, culture wars, as well as trends in educational technology, multi-platform production and media literacy.
Between these two talks, and another to researchers plus a three-hour workshop Finns got a chance to see Plum Landing, Arthur, Peep, Curious George, Poisoner’s Handbook, Design Squad Nation and the Next Gen projects. This caps a year of collaborative projects between WGBH and a number of Finnish universities which has included exchange trips and the demoing and researching of our games in Finland.
Plum Landing prototypes were part of a presentation by our Finnish research partners from the Universities of Tampere and Jyväskylä.
Kids play Design Squad Games and Poisoner’s Handbook at a Finnish university open house.
There’s a lot of singing in Finland. These are the event’s main academic organizers.
The cloudberry parfait was pretty awesome.
Study Finds that Use of PBS KIDS Content in the Classroom Improves Early Math Skills in Preschool Children
A new study conducted by Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC), and SRI International found that the acquisition of essential early math skills, such as counting, recognizing numerals, recognizing shapes, and patterning, increased significantly among four- and five-year-old children from economically disadvantaged communities who participated in a 10-week PBS KIDS Transmedia Math Supplement initiative. Transmedia includes the use of familiar characters, settings, and stories across different media formats.
The materials featured videos and interactive content from several PBS KIDS properties, including our very own Curious George Busy Day Games which are also now available in Spanish!.
Key findings of the 2013 Ready To Learn study include:
- Children who used the PBS KIDS math supplement, which incorporated videos, digital games, interactive whiteboards, laptop computers, teacher support, and hands-on math materials, improved significantly in their understanding of the targeted early mathematics skills compared to the control group.
- Children who used the same technology without the integrated math materials did not experience the same learning gains compared to the control.
- Teachers who used the math supplement reported significant changes in their confidence and comfort with early mathematics concepts and teaching with technology.
Nothing says Halloween more than a monkey, some pumpkins and some adorable bunnies. In other words, we are greeting the season with an HTML5 platformer for Curious George.
It takes a village to make a game, and here are the villagers: Laura, Bharat, Fran, Dan, Gentry, Belinda, Mike A. and Amy.
Digital Things! 