Challenging Student Creativity with Great Results: iPad Camp at ACOA

Artwork created in Procreate by iPad Camp student

The last full week in July was iPad Camp at the Academy Center of the Arts in Lynchburg. This was an especially wonderful group of kids. There were 3 boys and 3 girls. That turns out to be a great balance of energy and skills. The girls were older and more focused, the boys were younger and higher energy.  These camps provide kids with an opportunity to challenge their creative problem solving skills by learning media production tools in a non-structured environment. I am most appreciative of ACOA efforts to develop arts/technology programming.

Life Stories: One Story A Beginning

Adult cicada  Wikipedia: Public Domain

Growing up on an old farm outside of Washington DC, I had access to 40 acres of fields, barns and woods. It was a time when kids wandered and explored for hours a day, especially in the summer. 

Tiny Books Big Fun

I am seduced by the digital realm, I admit. But there is something about working with paper that floats my boat. I had a great opportunity to be reminded of this recently at the Tiny Books Exhibit and Workshop at Riverviews Art Space here in Lynchburg, VA. It added to the festive experience that it was very well attended in no small part due to great local newspaper coverage.

Kid Friendly Sea-Saving Art

Get to the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. by September 5th if you can. You won't be sorry.

As an artist I am drawn to beauty and I am good at mimicking it. However, I have the most profound respect for those artists who create beautiful work and pull together diverse threads of universal themes...and in this case make it an excellent educational experience for kids. I love this work. I love the idea, the colors and the venue.

Parrotfish, Washed Ashore

Seventeen sculptures of marine life created by Washed Ashore.org have been on exhibit at the zoo since May 27, 2016 (and leaving September 5th). Washed Ashore is a nonprofit dedicated to creating an awareness of marine debris and plastic pollution through art. The sculptures on exhibit were created from plastic garbage that washed up on a 300 mile stretch of west coast beaches. Eighteen tons of debris was collected by thousands of volunteers. These volunteers not only clean the beaches of debris. The materials they collect are sorted and  turned into art.

Discover the World of Communication at American University

In July I taught two classes at American University's very extensive summer program for high school students, Discover the World of Communication at their Washington, D. C. campus.  Professor Sarah Menke-Fish founded the program and has been the director for over 20 years. I taught for the second two-week session with nineteen courses offered, including Advanced Scriptwriting  and Video Production, The Film Intensive,  Broadcast Journalism, Media for Change, Speaking for Impact and Nature Photography. My classes were Graphic Design and Animation. I was very impressed with the program and want to make sure teachers, parents and students are aware of this opportunity for future summers.

I had not spent much time at AU in my many years living in the area. It was a delightful surprise to discover this beautiful campus. Our classes were held in McKinley Building pictured below.

Jump-Start Your Kids' Creativity in this Garage

Victor Reyes USA

Kids, Creativity and Imagination
I am reading some interesting articles about kids and creativity. Imagination keeps coming up as an integral component in nurturing creative children. That's not all of course, but something we know kids are innately good at doing. One of the wonderful things about parenting is all those "teaching moments" that arise continually during the day. The real challenge is having the energy to deal with all of them.

How YouTube is Advancing Science Education

Kristin Reiber Harris
KristinHarrisDesign.com

Science education is something we can all agree is important. How are producers and educators making sense of the current landscape and helping students learn? Media producers have watched the industry change by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. In the 90's it was a miracle to get anything to happen on a dial up connection. Now we take HD streaming for granted. Producers get left in the dust if they are don't keep up with the state of the art, all while they get older (even the young ones) and audiences get younger with changing tastes and preferences. These are some of the issues Dan Sonnett, video producer and owner of Sonnett Media Group, LLC discussed at a recent meeting of the The Women in Film & Video (EdCM) Education & Children's Media Roundtable. Dan is a long time contractor with the Smithsonian's National Natural History Museum were is currently Sr. Video Producer and Science Communicator.
 

TV is Broken
Dan set the stage for our conversation by reminding us that TV is broken. He had fascinating statistics about what, why and when kids are access online video. YouTube has over 1 billion users. In March of 2015, YouTube attracted 31.8 million users aged 18 to 24 (98% of the U.S internet users in that age bracket). All this is very important data for media producers. In a nut shell, kids are spending lots of time online and jumping around, probably while multi-tasking. This is not really much of a surprise. How does this relate to education? In addition to teens liking the online video offerings, teachers do too. They provide visual demonstrations or evidence and can clearly dramatize events and concepts. The videos are short which is a good match for student attention spans.

Maier Museum iPad Camp: A Success Story

Five afternoons in mid-June, the Maier Museum at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Va hosted eager and dedicated iPad artist between the ages of 8 and 13 for the first iPad camp of the summer. Surrounded by art treasures from the Maier Museum collection, what better location to inspire students to be creative.

My objective in organizing these iPad camps is to encourage students to become content creators not just content consumers. When I asked the students how they use their iPads, I heard a lot about Minecraft and Youtube. We all know how easy it is to become addicted to the wide range of media at our fingertips with our mobile devices.  My mission: convince students to use their own creative energies and expertise to become animators, storytellers and developers too. Few things make me happier than to see this mission accomplished as successfully as it was that week.

Olivia's wonderful cat with a view of the Flip Boom Cartoon interface.

Check Out These Student Authors and Illustrators Published on iPads

Still feeling the glow of the recent Digital Storytelling Workshop at the Startup Summer Institute at Howard University's Middle School of Mathematics and Science. This program was a collaboration between Global Sleepover and Demibooks to help students develop global awareness and produce interactive books on iPads. Representing Demibooks, I joined Geeta Raj of Global Sleepover for the second week of the camp. The first week she focused on helping the students develop their skills as storytellers and illustrators. She worked with them to craft stories about different countries around the world. I assisted the students with Demibooks Composer Pro. This app for creating apps, let them load their text, illustrations and audio files and add animation and interactivity to their stories and publish their work.

Isaiah King's Cover Artwork

Global Storytelling, iPad Camp and Publishing Student Authors/Illustrators

Kristin Reiber Harris

I joined Geeta Raj of Global Sleepover on Monday, July 28th at Howard University in Washington, DC for the Digital Storytelling Workshop at the Startup Summer Institute

at Howard University's Middle School of Mathematics and Science. This program provided a group of students with the opportunity to explore app design as well as storytelling and interactivity.  I arrived for the second week of the camp on behalf of Demibooks to help the students produce interactive books on iPads. The first week of the camp, Geeta worked with the students writing stories with a focus on global adventures. Each story that took place in different countries with characters from that country featured in the stories.

I was very impressed with the campus. Undergraduate Library, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Lessons Learned from Seven iPad Camps

This camp was my 7th iPad Camp of the summer but my first specifically as a trainer for Demibooks. Emboldened with a wealth of experience working with students 8 to 13 (some adults too) I had a grasp on what could be accomplished in this short period of time. Earlier in July, I spent two weeks working with students at Linkhorne Middle School in Lynchburg, Virginia. Our sessions were only 3 hours long for four afternoons a week. The students had been able to write, illustrate and produce stories that incorporated a variety of interactive components and animation. I appreciated that we would have a lot more time with the students at this camp and I saw the benefits of this extra time.

What We Learned at iPad Camp

Kristin Reiber Harris

I am in the middle of a new series of iPad camps for Lynchburg City Schools. Here are a few thoughts about what I learned during 4 sessions of iPad Camp sponsored by the Daura Gallery at Lynchburg College in June. You will see lots of samples of student work and get an idea of what they learned. Some students came with some experience with animation or video, but many did not.

iPads As Creative Tools
I am even more convinced iPads are incredible tools for stimulating creative problem solving and critical thinking. The students at the four sessions at Lynchburg College ran the gamet from kids as young as 8 (by just a few days) to a retired college professor. There was a broadcast media professional, an artist, four sets of parent and child and high school students. This rich tapestry of participants produced an wide variety of work, as you can imagine.

These creative experiences with technology reinforce the value of being a content creator, not just a content consumer. 

Artist Nugent Kos used Procreate to paint this beautiful spider web for her interactive Composer Pro project.

Getting Ready for iPad Camp

Kristin Reiber Harris

Yeah, iPad Camp!
I am very excited to be preparing for four sessions of iPad Camp sponsored by the Friends of the Daura Gallery at Lynchburg College. There will be two 3 hour sessions a day, the first for students 8 to 12 years old and the second for teens and adults. Each camp lasts for 5 days. I have been pleased with the response and registration and am really looking forward to getting things rolling on Monday afternoon.

Lynchburg College Dell, Lynchburg, VA  Credit:Imaginegod614 Wikipedia CC

My objectives for the camp are primarily three fold:
     1. introduce some well-tested tools for creative media production; 
         animation, video production and interactive books 
         It's important to remember this is about process, not everyone will have 
         a completed project at the end of 5 days. However, they will know how to do it.
     2. support an exploration of those tools through the students original projects
     3. walk the students through the steps professionals use to create media; 
         a good idea, planning with storyboards, asset creation and production
         (Learn about my work as a professional media producer on my website.) 

Play and Inspiration at SEEC: Part 2

Kristin Reiber Harris

This is Part 2 (Part 1) of a series of articles about the recent seminar Play: Engaging Young Learning in Object Rich Environments at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center in Washington, D.C. These articles are not necessarily in the order of events at the seminar. It was such a rich, inspiring event I have not even tried to prioritize my favorite activities.

On Friday morning, day two, seminar attendees were divided into small groups to visit the SEEC preschool classrooms. My group of three headed over to the visit the Penguins. I was accompanied by an educator from the National Museum of the American Indian and a preschool teacher from the Peabody Primary Capitol Hill Cluster School.

SEEC is no ordinary preschool. Founded by the Smithsonian in 1988, it was established to be a model in museum-based education for young children. Their mission statement indicates their purpose is two-fold. One to provide a model educational program that empowers kids to think, explore and express their potential as well as sharing this educational expertise on a national level.

National Museum of Natural History looking across the Mall from the Castle Photo KH

Sugata Mitra: SOLEs and the Future of Education

If you don't know about Sugata Mitra's research, I hope to remedy that right now. I spent a recent Sunday immersed in Mitra's many online video presentations, mesmerized by the results of his research with kids and technology. My favorite and the most succinct of these is this TED talk. I just watched it again for the 3th time.

This is a 20 minute presentation, which you may not have the time to jump into now, so let me summarize some of the highlights for you.  As the winner of the 2013 TED Prize, he received one million dollars to implement his theories as outlined in this presentation.

His topic in this video presentation is the Future of Education.  Sugata suggests that the current system evolved about 300 years ago in Victorian England. The British were able to manage one of the largest Empires in history without computers, telephones or airplanes with hand written data on pieces of paper. What they did have was a bureaucratic administrative machine.  They created schools to generate the manpower to run this bureaucratic administrative machine. The students needed to become identical. They needed to write alike because the data was hand written. They needed to be able to read and do math in their heads. They needed to be identical so they could be moved from New Zealand to Canada and be instantly functional.

The world of Victorian England does not exist anymore. What does that mean for education? What's next? It's not even that the schools are broken, they were actually very well designed and are working as designed. The problem is that they are outdated. 

Mitra's research began while he was teaching programming in New Delhi. He wanted to find out how slum children, who played beside the school where he taught, would interact with a computer. He sealed a computer and mouse in a wall of the slums beside his office and left it there for the children. Only instructing them that they could play with it if they wanted and that he was going away. When he came back 8 hours later, they were browsing the internet.

Concerned that someone had shown the kids (some as young as 6 years old) how to use the mouse, Mitra moved his experiments to much more remote villages in India to remove the possibility of the kids getting help from computer savvy adults.  One group of children after a couple of months complained that they wanted a better mouse and a faster processor. They lamented that they had had to teach themselves English in order to play the games.

Mitra's attention is captured by this idea that they had taught themselves. Their progress was clearly based on motivation and sharing information. He wanted to settle this question of the children teaching themselves with an absurd proposition. He put a computer in a Tamil speaking community and loaded it with information in English about DNA replication. He assumed he would leave the computer after a baseline test of the children's knowledge of DNA, come back for additional testing that would just replicate the initial scores of 0%. However that's not what happened. Eventually with only passive assistance the scores reached 50%. 

Among his conclusions is that knowing is obsolete. If you need to know, you find out. Encouragement is the key to learning. The new role of the teacher is to ask the big questions and provide encouragement. This shifts the focus of education away from the threat of punishment/exams which have a tendency to shut down the brain.

Mitra's wish for the future is SOLEs, self organized learning environments. The teacher poses the questions and admires the answers. He has documented in his research how he has seen this process work. He challenges us is to set up these kinds of learning environments and share the results with others. He was awarded one million dollars from TED to implement his wish. You can get the SOLE Toolkit here.

Sugata Mitra's studies revolved around kids much younger than college students but these findings are certainly relevant for all levels of education.  How can we use this information in our classrooms? What are you already doing that supports his theories?

Please watch the TED presentation above and hear him present his ideas. He is much more articulate than my paraphrasing. 

Here are some websites with information about his work.
http://www.ncl.ac.uk/ecls/staff/profile/sugata.mitra
http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/
http://sugatam.blogspot.com/

Storytelling: Tool for Creative Problem Solving

My next faculty workshop at LynchburgCollege later in October will be to demo Composer Pro from Demibooks, the developers of Composer Studio that I used with my Governor's School Media Production class in July.  I stumbled upon this excellent blog article from Second Story about the power of story to solve complex problems. It's a very timely concept in relationship to Composer Pro. It is a production tool for creating interactive media and a perfect vehicle for telling complex (or simple) stories that can be shared on iPads.

In the blog article Laura Allcorn, Second Story Senior Content Strategist, discusses a storytelling concept known as Critical Design from Dunne & Raby at the Royal College of Art. The purpose is to create something that makes people think and challenges old ideas. They do this with both fiction and humor. Laura includes this quote from Jonathan Gotschall's The Storytelling Animal about the power of fiction;

Fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction, which is designed to persuade through argument and evidence. Studies show that when we read non-fiction, we read with our shields up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story, we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally, and this seems to make us rubbery and easy to shape. 

Allcorn also cited the thoughts of comedian Chris Bliss about humor to break down barriers. Here is his TedTalk Comedy in Translation.

This in mind, I think of one of my favorite apps, Sock Puppets. I would like to challenge students to explore possible solutions to serious problems with the iPad app Sock Puppets. Remember folks, the target audience for my work is young children and I often proudly describe myself as a mental age of 5. As you may be able to guess, Sock Puppets is a storytelling app in which young user select images of sock puppets and manipulate them to tell a story. Amazingly, as the user speaks, the sock puppets lip sync the speakers voice. This happens whenever the app is open and then can be recorded and played back. Hence a story is told, a play performed with puppets realistically speaking their dialogue. It's poetry in motion. And funny too.

Sock Puppets playhouse, one of many props and sets of characters

If you are in Central Virginia, mark you calendar:  Saturday, November 2 from 8:30 am until 1 pm iSchool Initiative Emily Wolfe and other guests will be at Lynchburg College to explore Contemporary Technology in Today's Classroom. Free and open to the public. Come with your students to learn how iSchool Initiative is challenging educational institutions to use all tools available to engage students.

Kristin Reiber Harris
my new app Duck Takes A Ride: An Art Story is now available in the App Store.
It is an interactive animated narrative for preschool children illustrated with 
ancient Chinese and Egyptian sculpture from major museum collections.
 

Sandbox Summit 2013 SumUP

Sandbox Summit
Cambridge MA 
April 15th and 16th, 2013

Weren't able to attend? Here's an overview of the speakers, events and highlights. I tried to be brief, but this conference was delightfully content rich. Just the venue itself was a treat. Most of our sessions were in the Stata Center on the MIT campus. The campus is a stunning array of fascinating architecture, the Stata Center designed by Frank Gehry one of the most dramatic.

Stata Center, MIT  Architect: Frank Gehry

1.  We were welcomed by Scot Osterweil, Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade. This was not the first Summit and Scot and the founders Claire Green, Wendy Smolen have obviously developed a great working relationship to produce there events. The Arcade is involved in researching game play and creating games for enhanced learning.

2. Andy Clayman, Creative Director, Avenues: The World School
In the Beginning: Building creativity from the ground up
http://youtu.be/K0dIrjalP8w 
Avenues: The World School is a private school with a campus in Manhattan built from the ground up to create an environment that facilitates learning, creativity and preparation for life as a global citizen. Numerous YouTube videos are available about the campus and the philosophy as well as Clayman's presentation.  As they describe on  their site, "Among the most distinguishing features of Avenues is the concept of one school with 20 or more campuses in major cities around the world. Once realized, this system will allow fluid exchanges between campuses of students and teachers, as well as a full range of interactive collaborations." Stunning physical space, enlightened philosophy only down side is very expensive tuition. How can this be modified and adapted for a wider audience?

TAKE AWAY:  Sure, we have the brain power to come up with an kick-ass school but at a price that puts it out of reach for the 99%.

BEST LINK: Introductory video 

BONUS Surprise:  Sandbox Summit gave all of us a $50 certificate to donate to the teacher of our choice on Donors Choose.org. Katie Bisbee gave us some background information about the organization. Such a wonderful expression of the best of human nature on all levels. I used this gift card to support Mrs. Miller's classroom at Perrymont Elementary School here in Lynchburg, VA and Mrs. William's class at J M Hanks High School in El Paso, TX.

3. Margaret Robinson, Managing Director, Hide & Seek 
New Games/Old Rules: How we play today
I was interested in attending Sandbox because I am not a gamer. I want to have a better understanding of the value of games in an educational environment. Margaret talked about games as collaboration, inspiration, exploration and tools for sparking the imagination. Games as vehicles for creating community and games as a challenge to learn a system. For games to work, they need to be dynamic, intimate, artificial (too much like work if they aren't) and competitive, even if against yourself. This was one of my favorite sessions.

Two of their products really caught my attention.  Tate Trump is a very cool in-museum app (Tate Modern, London) that prompts visitors to collect images from the collection on their iPhones and try to outdo other players.  The criteria for the games?  If pitted against each other, which objects or people (represented in artwork in the museum) would do better in battle?  Which images best communicate exhilaration, menace or absurdity. I see their criteria as a bit off the wall, which of course makes it more interesting. Predictable would have been....well, predictable. I'm curious about their process on developing this game. I suspect it is lots of fun to play and popular.  

Another game series Hide & Seek created is 99 Tiny Games. Their objective was to make inclusive competititve events that everyone could enjoy during the 2012 Olympics in London. They came up with a scheme that placed game instructions in 99 locations around London. I checked out a few of the activities, but would love to learn about every one.  Number 61 is The Dum Dum Game, a sight and sound game for two or more players. With a good view of a number of people, one player will say dum, dum in cadence with the stride one set of people they observe. The other game player must pick out the correct set of people that sync with that cadence. Watch this video to see how it all works.

Image of Tiny Games from HideandSeek.net

TAKE AWAY:  The folks at Hide & Seek are brilliant.  Games can bring people together in a unique experience that builds community. There is value in fun and diversion.

BEST LINK: 99 Tiny Games, Wall Street Journal video

4. David Sherwin, Principal Designer, frog design
Hacking How We Learn; Everyday lessons in good design
frog design is a very large design firm with irons in many fires. frog has put a lot of energy into finding ways to use the design process to help communities that are not necessarily empowered with the skills, tools and time to improve their lives.  Their work with "The Girl Effect" was particularly impressive.  The Girl Effect is a nonprofit collaborative movement by various organizations to explores the use of digital media to help girls form community and help each other. They worked with girls in three of the largest urban slums in Nairobi to help them make connections and facilitate change in their communities. The testimonials of the girls were quite moving. They have made available to anyone their Collective Action Toolkit, resources and activities to collaboratively create solutions for community problems.

TAKE AWAY: Hard for me to wrap my head about the wide and diverse range of "products" from a huge multinational company I had never heard of, but very glad to know they are putting their expertise to good work helping girls communicate and understand how they can help each other.

BEST LINK: The Girl Effect

5.  Howard Gardner, Harvard Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education interviewed by former student Carla Seal-Wanner, Director o Education and Curriculum, FlickerLab
A Conversation with Howard Gardner: Creating media for a complex world 
http://youtu.be/g4i4RifZzWk
Gardner has spent his career thinking about the multiple intelligences children bring to learning. He defines these "minds" as ways of learning and processing information; disciplined mind, synthesizing mind, creative mind, respectful mind and ethical mind.  Gardner sees 21st century literacy as being communication plus media fluency.

TAKE AWAY: Shame on US educational system for letting the Finns take "our" research and leave us in the dust.

BEST LINK: Smithsonian magazine article about schools in Finland 

6. Fred Newman, President, Barking Dog Productions
Growing Up Weird: A story told with words and sounds
Absolutely one of the highlights of the conference.  A son of the South, Fred entered the auditorium whirling a musical device over his head and singing. It took me a few minutes to realize that this wasn't someone's idea of a prank. Check out his website, you will get a sense of the flavor of his folk humor and charismatic personality. Sound gets our attention, Fred's certainly did. Fred's advice is to live the story as you tell it and tell it in the present tense.

TAKE AWAY:  Story is first, but sound is second, image is third. Fred is a very cool guy. Talented and not afraid to be who he is. Great inspiration for kids.

BEST LINK: Fred on Sesame Street 

7. Art Smarts: How MoMA inspires creativity in kids
Led by Elizabeth Margulies, Assistant Director of Family Programs, MoMA and Cari Frisch, Associate Educator, Family Programs, MoMA
I had very recently visited the Art Lab at MoMA so there were few surprises with this workshop. The Art Lab is a fabulous resource for families. Check out my recent article about my visit. In the workshop we were given supplies and tasks that were very similar to what might happen in the Art Lab. We played and made art with such props as laminated cut paper and cardboard sculpture. A sad note, it was during this workshop that we learned of the Boston Marathon bombings.

TAKE AWAY: Art Lab and the Education Program at MoMA are well conceived and I will definitely stay tuned.

BEST LINK: Current Art Lab video trailer

8. Geoff Nelson, Co-Founder and President of Cricket Moon Media
From Easel to iPad: The evolution of creativity tools
Geoff recommends these criteria for creativity app design; open ended exploration, play and endless challenges. He references an idea Chris Donnelly presents on his blog that creative freedom and structure have a dynamic relationship.  Too little structure inhibits creativity and too much structure does the same.  There is a sweet spot when structure augments the creative process.

Some apps he recommended are 123D Sculpt; Pitch Painter (very cool composing tool which is described as musical finger paint), Scribblify, Node Beat and STRAVA. The last is an app that lets you map your bike ride as you do it.  Some users have used the app to make art by planning routes that draw recognizable objects on the map.  

123D Sculpt

After Geoff introduced some of his ideas about app creation, we were instructed to break into groups to design an app...all in 15 minutes. Poppy cock I say to myself, it can't be done in such a short period of time. I was proven completely wrong. Following the idea of the benefits of structure, each of the four groups was given a topic for the app we were to brainstorm. The categories were role play, tactile creativity, construction and stories with written words. This was a competition with prizes. Well, the tactile creativity group blew us all out of the water with an idea for an ice sculpture app.  Wow, what a great idea and how much fun would that be?

TAKE AWAY:  Brilliant conceptualizing can happen in minutes with the right structure and mind set. Watch what Geoff and Cricket Moon Media are publishing, especially independent productions.

BEST LINK:  Their Egg Foo You app

9. Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, Co-Founders of Jib Jab Media Inc and StoryBots
Storytelling 2.0
http://youtu.be/G7JaMTRm3sI
I fell in love with these "boys". I already knew I loved their products, they were half of the reason I came to Sandbox. They were charming, savvy presenters and had a wonderful story to tell of persevering, having a solid creative strategy and plain ole hard work. We all know them for their political animated video "This Land is Your Land" from the 2004 presidential campaign.  What I didn't know is that they were on the verge of throwing in the towel right before "This Land" went viral.  Fast forward to today and they have had 80 million views for that video. That was a memorable jolt but they still had to craft a business model that would make money. They hit upon customizing content which allowed customers to use their own images on JibJab templates. Now as fathers and family men, they focus on media for children with their site StoryBots. As I got to share with the brothers as I almost tackled them as they were leaving the Stata Center, I think their book Biggest Pizza Ever is one of the best stories ever. I look forward to reading many new StoryBots.

StoryBot.com

TAKE AWAY: Fun to meet heroes and have them act like they are genuinely appreciative of the admiration.

BEST LINK: Biggest Pizza Ever

10.  Mathias Crawford, Stanford Graduate Fellow, Department of Communication, Stanford University
After the Sandbox: Everything we didn't learn in kindergarten 
http://youtu.be/6S7e2cmUlKI
 A bit brain dead by this time Tuesday afternoon, my take away from Mathias is that the best kind of play requires/encourages attention to the other, as in bebop and jazz. He said his game of choice is Cold Claim. 

TAKE AWAY: Jazz is a collaborative game

11.  Alan Schulman, Chief Creative Officer, SapeintNitro
It's a Brand new World: Moving from storytelling to storyscaping
Alan felt that collaboration was the best creative model, referencing previous speaker Mathias's jazz and bebop references. He described storyscaping as: understanding experience space, ie retaining more from the experience than the story; an organizing or Big Idea, copy, tranform, combine; develop a storyscape and lastly never use a period, always a comma, keep things going.

TAKE AWAY:  Everything is a Remix has found fans on every level. A MUST SEE.

BEST LINK:  Everything is a Remix 

12. Dale Dougherty, President and CEO of Maker Media
Make it Happen: Turning ideas into innovations
http://youtu.be/liTTqgXpDmg
The Maker Movement is changing industry, culture and education. The idea is to change the passive consumer into a producer and an uninspired student into an engaged learner. Dale works to create spaces in schools, communities and online to help kids and adults build, tinker, explore, fail and become creative makers. Huh, this is what artists do... The maker movement is a return to play and focuses on activities that build confidence. The Maker Mindset is interdisciplinary, interacts with others and is playful. He pointed out, and I concur, we live in a time of tactile deficiency. Dale left us with this thought.  You can learn to do anything.
TAKE AWAY:  Support local arts programs, artists are makers.  Incorporate more technology into my kids arts programs.

BEST LINK: Young Makers, makers in education

13. Pitch Sessions with Jean Hammond, Learn Launch, Learn LaunchX
Unfortuneaty now I am running on only the few brain cells still firing. Jean Hammond of Learn Launch hosted a number of companies as they pitched their apps for potential funding. School Fuel, customizes apps and resources for schools, referencing Common Core Standards.; BoomWriter for collaborative writing, TimeTribe developed by an anthropologist and OutThink, presenting Tornado Maker to manipulate weather phenomenon. Very solid presentations with Tornado Maker my clear favorite.

TAKE AWAY:  These were robust companies pitching that had invested both lots of time in money to get where they were.

BEST LINK: Tornado Maker Kickstarter video 

20130416  LearnLaunch - School Fuel
http://youtu.be/K9q1eG5KKPM

20130416 Sandbox Summit LearnLaunch - Tiggly
http://youtu.be/6pRdeh6U3UM

20130416 Sandbox Summit LearnLaunch - BoomWriter
http://youtu.be/ZFTrBomMGjs

20130416 Sandbox Summit LearnLaunch - The Time Tribe
http://youtu.be/gsNUg8VtOwE

20130416 Sandbox Summit LearnLaunch - Yummico
http://youtu.be/81gAhbi-U1M

20130416 Sandbox Summit LearnLaunch - Outthink
http://youtu.be/GHim0vl04yA

20130416 Sandbox Summit LearnLaunch - Cognii
http://youtu.be/o7LTpgp_JB8


Kudos and a big thanks to Claire and Wendy for a job well done providing an opportunity to build community and exchange stimulating ideas.

Thank you Scott Traylor from 360Kid.com for the session video.