Games and Learning

A year ago we launched gamesandlearning.org at an event in San Francisco surrounded by game developers, funders and those hoping to unlock the power of games to teach. But we also inaugurated the site by showing a brief clip of an interview with one of Sesame Street’s founders, Joan Ganz Cooney.

Cooney later created the Joan Ganz Cooney Center as a innovation and research lab and that center is responsible for this site.

In honor of our first year covering the future of technology and learning we thought it might be appropriate to take stock of where this quest to use new media to teach in part came from by sharing some more of Ms. Cooney’s recollections of how research and creativity helped spark a television program and a new way of producing.

“No one had ever seen anything like the research that we built in. And the producers, all the creative people, you would have thought they would have fought it, they loved it,” she said about the mixing of science and television producing. “Because they were getting feedback right away on work they were doing on whether it a) engaged the children (which was essential) and b) did it teach them what it was intended to teach. So it was different from anything that had been tried before.”

Cooney also recalled how using research to help design the program helped Sesame Street’s producers understand not just what was educational about the program, but also what was working and not working.

“The idea of knowing before you went on the air that children liked your show and that it did what you said it was going to do in terms of teaching and learning,” she saidm adding, “At times I couldn’t tell the research people from the producers… I heard a researcher say to a producer once, ‘Lighten up, man. This is a television show. If it doesn’t teach exactly what you have in mind, the question is, does it get halfway there and is it entertaining?’ Because we were very determined to have an entertaining show.”

And despite the successes of Sesame Street over the past 40-plus years, Cooney said she is even more excited about the potential of games to educate since it is something children and parents can do together, saying, “there’s something for the parent to do in the game that’s perhaps more engaging than just watching a television show. So I have higher hopes that there will be more co-viewing, co-playing, co-reading, doing things together with the technology. I think the technology is very attractive to the parents as well as the child.”