Tag Archives: well-being

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and Roblox are thrilled to announce the third season of Into the Digital Future, our podcast that explores the complexities of parenting in the digital age. This season, hosts Jordan Shapiro (Cooney Center Senior Fellow and author of Father Figure: How to be a Feminist Dad and The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World) and Laura Higgins (Senior Director of Community Safety & Digital Civility at Roblox) dig into the complexities…

Dear Friends, Happy October! The best month, in my opinion—although are we tired of pumpkin spice yet? First things first: we were thrilled to see so many applications to our Well-Being by Design Fellowship. Thanks to all who have applied. We’ll be announcing our next cohort in December! Now, some recent highlights: We’re six months into the debate over Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. Agree or disagree with the book’s choice of data, conclusions, and recommendations, its publication kicked…

Ever since I joined the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s Well-being by Design Fellowship, I have found myself subconsciously auditing my entire virtual world for its well-being design considerations. Does the team budget spreadsheet system promote feelings of competence for my colleagues? How does my wedding website support guests’ sense of identity? Did this airline-app-that-shall-not-be-named consider users’ feelings of autonomy in times of a global airline outage at all? I was delighted to attend the Play Make Learn annual conference at UW…

The Call for Applications is now open through October 11, 2024.  If you follow our work, you may have seen the incredible results produced by our inaugural cohort of Well-Being by Design Fellows.  Building from the success of the first year of this program, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to announce a second year of the Well-being by Design Fellowship, supported by Pinterest.  We invite applications from mid-career designers of kids’ technology and media who want to prioritize…

As an instructor at the Fowler School of Engineering at Chapman University, I teach an undergraduate  Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) class regularly. This class is a hands-on, project-based course that teaches students the fundamental principles of HCI and Interaction Design. The course aims to enable students to apply interaction design methodology—discovering requirements, designing alternatives, prototyping, and evaluating—to develop technology that puts the user’s needs upfront. In the Spring 2024 semester, our class goal was to design technology that supports the digital…

During the week of the 2024 Games for Change Festival, the Cooney Center had the privilege of helping to organize a series of events to bring the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children Project (RITEC) learnings to life by sharing the backstory of the research process and work with children, and demonstrating how some have begun putting the RITEC-8 framework into practice. Celebrating the launch of the recent RITEC research report: Diving into working with children for children We started…

In 2024, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center invited 10 professionals who design kids tech to join us for the inaugural Well-Being by Design Fellowship. The organizations that these fellows represent range from small startups to large, well-established companies; all of them share a passion for creating great digital experiences for young people.  Throughout the fellowship, we met regularly as a learning community, workshopping ideas informed by well-being and child development frameworks and applying them to the fellows’ digital products for…

We are very excited to share new research produced by UNICEF Innocenti – Global Office of Research and Foresight as part of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) initiative. The Cooney Center was fortunate to hear insights from the researchers as the report was being finalized. From a Cooney Center perspective, there are several things that we love about it: Many initiatives work to create a framework and then leave it there. The RITEC initiative developed the RITEC-8…

The importance of play for children’s development and learning has long been recognized by parents, educators and researchers.1 Much of our lives are now being lived in digital contexts, and this is true for children as well. With the global popularity of video games such as Minecraft and Angry Birds, a great deal of children’s play these days includes digital games. This has raised some concerns about possible negative effects of digital technology, and it is important that parents help…

With so much going on in the kids’ tech policy world, including a mention during the State of the Union address, we are back with thoughts on recent developments. We also have several events to share, so please read on. The legislative and regulatory landscape addressing children’s experiences in digital environments can feel vast, with the FTC, Congress, and state legislatures across the country wrestling with a variety of ways to approach these challenging issues. The academic community continues to…