Get ‘Em Outside! Shaping Youth Heads for The Hills

May 17, 2016 Between this post about children's sensory atrophy and the positive practices of Vitamin N...nature, I feel compelled to send another shoutout on Twitter to "Get 'Em Outside!" (video embedded below) Kids faces beam with energy and fun making informal learning a 'vitamin E' for environment+ education...all in show-n-tell hands-on form. The excitement is … [Read more...]

MultiTasking for Studious Souls: Flashcards, Mobile, & More

If e-mail and IM is giving way to mobile minutes and 'texting teens' in your house (er, maybe just mine!) take heart, there are a gazillion NEW mobile uses and start-ups that are watch-worthy. As this article in Read-Write-Web conveys, and my own mobile media moments gleaned from the Ypulse mashup ascribe, there's so much shifting to mobile focus it's hard to keep up. … [Read more...]

Virtual-to-Real World Play Patterns; Sims Used For Solutions?

Shaping Youth Correspondent Sara Grimes (at left) our hands-on research pro in the gaming arena and a smart as a whip academic to boot, (here's scholarly Sara at ACT Lab) has helped us ALL by distilling the findings from a new study on kids, toys and online play, which she posted on her blog Gamine Expedition. (always on our sidebar if you lose the link!) Here’s the … [Read more...]

Kids’ Online Ethics Part 3: Community Solidarity; Marketing Cheats

At the recent Ypulse Nat'l Mashup, I chatted with teen virtual goods wünderkind Asuka Martin also interviewed here by Benett Carter about Teen Second Life. I'm fascinated by her composure in handling the mining of her intellectual property/content creation, (someone swiping her stuff) as well as the impact on her authentic brand of custom-created virtual textures and 'skins,' … [Read more...]

Kids’ Gaming Ethics and Immersive Virtual Worlds (Part 2)

Are "cheat codes" a symbol of impatient multi-taskers incapable of working through frustration that need to leap frog over the hard part of life? Or a conduit to open new challenges at higher levels of engagement at a self-motivating pace? With fuzzy ethics, blurred boundaries and zig-zags aplenty in immersive gaming environs, I'd say "cheats" is a loaded term in and of … [Read more...]