The votes are in for our latest Top Builder challenge: benjakov’s DIY instrument is the tops! He used cardboard, rubber bands, a shoe box, pencils, and a paper towel tube to make a guitar. This player’s design earned the most community votes and Top Builder status on the Design Squad Global website.
The inspiration for — and voice of — Izz Green of our environmental project Meet the Greens is just completing her real-life degree in Marine Science.
In this new interview, you can read about how the real Izz Green traveled across the world to help understand and conserve mangrove trees.
For more mangrove fun check out Plum Landing:
In time for Earth Day, we launch Outdoor Family Fun with Plum for iOS and Android.
Does your family have a few minutes at the bus stop or 15 minutes to play outside? Try a mission from Plum and start building a healthy habit! Spending time outdoors has many benefits and nature is all around – you just have to look!
This app offers daily activities that will get your family outside, exploring your neighborhood and learning about nature. It’s part of PLUM LANDING, a PBS KIDS project that helps kids develop a love for this amazing and beautiful planet we call home.
Features
For more learning adventures with Plum, visit pbskids.org/plumlanding
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.pbskids.outdoorfamilyfunwithplum&hl=en
iOS App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/outdoor-family-fun-with-plum/id1218401498?mt=8
Bill has written a chapter for this weighty tome.
Other chapters include ones from our friends at PBS, CPB, EDC, SRI and Boston Children’s Hospital.
About the Book
Bringing together the leading researchers on children, adolescents, and the media, this books offers their cutting-edge, ‘big picture’ ideas for the future of research and scholarship in the field. Individual chapters focus on topics such as the role of big data in media research, digital literacy, parenting in the era of mobile media, media diversity in the digital age, the impact of media on child development, children’s digital rights, the implications of ‘intelligent’ characters and parasocial relationships, and the effectiveness of transmedia for informal education. Several chapters also explore the theoretical and methodological challenges facing children’s media researchers. Offering new directions for research, the contributors consider the implications of the changing media landscape for parents, educators, advocates, and producers. Leading scholars from North America, Europe and Asia, grounded in different theoretical and methodological traditions, join forces to discuss the impact of growing up in a media- saturated world, and to stimulate thinking about the field of children and media in unexpected ways. This book was originally published as two special issues of the Journal of Children and Media.
Article about our work on ARTHUR by our very own Cyrisse.
Design Squad Global’s site has a new addition. Design Remix, is a drawing feature that encourages kids to collaborate on designs to create something new or different.
Congrats to Melissa and her team: on development, Kal and Alex; Tara and Stefan on design; Bill, Louise, and Elizabeth for production support, and our project leader, Marisa.
Our popular and award winning FETCH! Lunch Rush app has just released a version 2.1 in the App Store.
Bill has a new article published entitled “Five hundred years back and five years forward: games and play at a new crossroads” in the tenth anniversary edition of the Journal of Children and Media.
As the abstract notes, it’s “A personal account of the state of educational play and games from Bill Shribman, a long-time producer of digital educational games.”
It spans his work from CDROM to the present day, but also looks at how children’s play has not changed as much as some may think, with a comparison of modern games and those depicted in Bruegel’s famous painting of kids at play, painted in 1560.
Digital Things! 