Touch screen devices have dramatically changed the way young children interact with technology. Preschoolers no longer have to struggle with a mouse or a laptop touch pad – they can now use their fingers to tap, drag, and trace items directly on the screen. When we started to develop one of our first robust iPad apps in 2010, we were extremely optimistic about all of the affordances of this new technology. What surprised us was the number of new challenges we needed to overcome to create a quality developmentally appropriate learning experience for young children.

Elmo Loves ABCs is an early literacy app that covers uppercase and lowercase letter recognition, as well as tracing, letter sounds, and alliteration. The app includes a free-play area with over 75 videos, coloring pages, and a hide-and-seek game, plus a directed-play section that has asks children to identify letters and objects that begin with certain letters. We also wanted to provide children with a lot of choice, so we put an alphabet boarder on the screen that allows them to select a new letter whenever they like.

As we do with almost all our new apps and games, we go directly to the experts—the children for whom our content is made — and watch as they navigate the experience and listen to what they have to say about it. In this case, children figured out how to play with the app immediately, but there were so many active hot-spots on screen that kids would unintentionally activate nearby letters or other spots where they placed their hands, creating a chaotic and confusing experience.

Our first attempt to resolve the issue of children accidentally activating buttons was to create a “boundary box” around the play screen so that if a child was tracing or drawing and accidentally dragged her finger over a button, it would not register. She would have to pick her finger up and place it on a letter to select it. The boundary box helped, but it wasn’t enough. Children were still resting their hands and wrists on the bottoms and sides of the iPad screen and unintentionally launching new activities and letters.

Our second attempt was to add “touch with intent” where the child would need to lift his finger and place it on a button for at least half a second to make a selection. The hope was that if we could discern an accidental tap from an intentional tap, we could provide children with more control over their experience. It didn’t work – children were no longer accidentally triggering new letters, but now they couldn’t select the ones they wanted. Rather than holding their finger on a button longer, children started to rapidly tap the screen expecting immediate feedback. Kids now thought the app was “broken” because it wasn’t responding to their initial touch in the way they expected.

Finally, one of our brilliant producers came up with the idea of using a two-step activation where an initial tap on the border lights up the buttons for five seconds to show that they are now “on”, and a second tap makes the selection. It worked! Young children were now in control of their experience and were able to freely explore letters.

Given that we successfully tackled a literacy app, we thought the math version, Elmo Loves 123s, (the sequel to ABCs) should be easy. However, when we started to work on the companion app a year and a half later the tablet market had already changed.  There was now a variety of new tablets with different screen sizes for which we had to plan. Some of the tablets were substantially smaller than the iPad, so if we used the same type of border that we have in Elmo Loves ABCs, the rest of the screen to watch videos, color, and play games would be very small. We had a brand new design challenge to conquer.

In developing Elmo Loves 123s, we decided to abandon the border entirely, and instead put all of the number choices and the directed play button on a menu that could be accessed at any time from an arrow at the top of the screen. To ensure that children remember how to access the number choices given that they are not constantly visible on the screen, Elmo provides reminders and the arrow blinks. The new design worked – we found that children were even more successful in navigating the app and freely exploring the numbers 1-20 in both the free play and directed play sections.

One of the best parts of creating a sequel app is that we can apply the knowledge from the formative testing of the first app to the development of the second app. For Elmo Loves 123s, we were able to include everything from its predecessor, add even more activities to the free play section (including a number find game, a counting activity, and 60 jigsaw puzzles), and provide more intuitive navigation for children.

Despite the thousands of hours we spend creating games and watching children engage with them, each new piece of technology brings another set of opportunities and obstacles, which, at the end of the day, is what keeps my job of creating content for digital games so exciting. And the children for whom we create these educational digital offerings make it all worthwhile.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

David Cohen is the director of domestic research for Sesame Workshop

When my friend tried to explain her divorce to her 8-year-old niece, her niece reflected “It’s going to take me awhile to process this.” Her niece’s reaction might be considered precocious, but it also shows the deep emotions children grapple with when faced with such a life altering effect.

Young children need ongoing and sensitive help from trusted adults who approach this event in age appropriate ways. In fact, young children are at risk of having more adjustment problems than older children, since they are still in the early process of developing the coping skills necessary to deal with all the changes associated with divorce. They also often blame themselves for the divorce or feel that it is their responsibility to bring their parents back together.

Given the special relationship that children develop with Sesame Street characters and the human cast, we believed that we could play a role for families going through this often traumatic situation. Clearly tackling a topic like divorce, especially with preschoolers, required a sensitive and thoughtful approach. Typical of all Sesame Workshop initiatives, our approach included the input of advisors, who included psychologists and other mental health professionals specializing in the impact of divorce on younger children. We also conducted preliminary research with divorced parents and their children, who viewed working drafts of the materials and provided suggestions and recommendations which could be incorporated into the final version.

We are incredibly grateful to the parents who shared their own stories and provided invaluable feedback about how we described and portrayed divorce. Feedback from parents helped fine tune the video in which Abby Cadabby’s friends show their support when she tells them about her parents’ divorce. For example, the moms and dads suggested that different types of divorce situations should be portrayed in the video, and not just those in which the divorced parents live near each other (as is the case with Abby’s parents in the video). To address this, producers included live action films of real families talking about how they cope when divorced parents live farther apart. These live action films were included with the Sesame Street story in the final version of the video.

Parents also mentioned that in the draft version Abby acted calm and composed when speaking about her parents’ divorce and that was not realistic. Instead parents suggested that Abby should show the feelings that they’ve seen in their own children — anger, confusion, and sadness. As a result, Abby was more explicit in expressing her complex emotions in the finished version of the video — she tells Gordon, “Yeah, I am angry! And sad… oh, I love my mommy and daddy so much!”

Great wisdom and sensitivity went into the creation of the materials. In the words of an 8-year-old girl, it took a lot to “process this.” With the help of the advisors and families who helped shape this project, we were able to launch “Little Children, Big Challenges: Divorce” which is available here. We’re hopeful this initiative will make a difference for families of divorce as they help their preschoolers navigate the challenges and experiences they’ll face together through this major life event.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

I am never quite sure what my daughter is thinking about as we interact.  I’ll watch my child’s reactions as I read her a book and I wonder whether she is thinking about the words that I am saying, the printed words on the page, the pictures I’m gesturing toward, or something else entirely.  And, when I see her completely mesmerized by something we’re watching on television,  I often wonder what aspects of the program she’s absorbing. One way to get ‘inside’ the minds of young children, especially children too young to articulate their thoughts in words, are studies that measure children’s neural activity while they engage in everyday activities like listening to stories or watching educational television. Such studies can not only help us understand which pieces of information children are processing in everyday situations, but how their brain is filtering, reacting to and registering the content to which they are exposed.

In a recent report published in the journal PLoS Biology, we demonstrated that the patterns of neural activity that children exhibit while watching Sesame Street predict their performance on school tests.  Children and adults all watched the same Sesame Street video as we measured their neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We then examined the neural activity over the length of the video for children and adults. We found that the degree to which children showed adult-like brain responses in certain brain regions predicted their math and verbal knowledge levels.  Our results thus indicate that Sesame Street is effective at eliciting patterns of neural activity that are related to children’s school performance.

On the basis of a long line of previous research, we knew that a region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus supports mathematical reasoning in adults, while a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (or “Broca’s area”) is critical for verbal abilities. In our study, we found that children with more mature neural activity in the intraparietal sulcus had higher math test scores whereas children with more mature neural activity in Broca’s area had higher verbal test scores.  Moreover, in the intraparietal sulcus, a mathematics-related brain region, children showed stronger neural activity during the Sesame Street scenes that were related to counting and numbers compared to other topics.  This tells us that children’s brains were filtering the mathematics-related content of the Sesame Street video into a region of the brain that processes mathematics and suggests that children are in fact thinking about numbers when they encounter them in an episode of Sesame Street.

In designing the study, we chose Sesame Street because it is mainstream: all of the students and professors in our research group had watched Sesame Street as children, or were otherwise familiar with the program.  In pilot MRI testing with children, we found that children were consistently engaged and entertained by the Sesame Street video.  A serious challenge in our developmental neuroimaging research is that young children often become bored and restless after a few minutes in the MRI scanner, which makes it difficult to get accurate brain images.  We did not find that to be the case when we showed them Sesame Street.  Thus, the effectiveness of Sesame Street in this research study was quite clear.

Our results are exciting because they provide the first evidence that children’s brains are doing important work while the children are left to do something that they might do naturally on their own: watch Sesame Street.  This gives us a window into what children’s minds are doing organically, in the real world – something which parents are often curious about, and something that, if understood, could unlock important secrets of children’s cognitive and neural functioning.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Sesame Workshop, whose mission is to help children reach their highest potential, is learning as much as we can about these media platforms so that we can use them to best meet children’s educational and developmental needs. We scour academic journals and policy-based reports; we consult experts in the field, and we also spend as much time as we can with children and parents observing and talking to them while they use touch screen devices.

Surprisingly, there are very few resources that are publically available to help guide developers who make educational apps for young children. Much like when Sesame Street was created in the 1960s and little was known at the time about how to best develop educational television, now too there seems to be little standardization for ensuring the best conditions under which children can learn from assets on these new touch screen devices. While understanding learning theories and how children process information through older media can lend some support in these endeavors, we quickly realized that these new technologies were raising additional questions about usability and navigation that could best be answered by experimentation.

Since jumping into the world of touch devices, we’ve learned many things to which we feel can benefit the industry and parents alike. That’s why, after conducting over 60 studies on the ways children interact with tablet devices, we have released our best practices, or “lessons learned.” This document is by no means “final.” Our practices are ever evolving as we learn from our research.

Just as researchers have documented the “formal features” of television, which are the rules, syntax, and indicators of audio and visuals cues designed to help children understand a television show, we are beginning to understand the formal features of touch screen devices. We now know, for example, that hotspots (triggers that take children to new locations within the app) in the lower right and left hand corners of the screen are precisely where children rest their wrists, which inevitably means that children accidentally exited the activity they were in. We have since recommended repositioning hotspots to the top of the screen so that children will not accidentally exit the focal activity. We know that children need both audio and visual clues to help support their play patterns. We have also learned that more complex gestures such as pinching are not as intuitive and easy for the developing dexterity of a preschooler.

As with everything we do, we want to ensure that children learn from their digital experiences. To improve comprehension and learning from games, we provide a three-tiered educational scaffold (three opportunities with increasing support so that children can advance in a game) when children do not know the answers to challenging questions. For book apps and ebooks, we have learned that making the story narration uninterruptable increases story comprehension. We know that the “bells and whistles” of interactivity can, at times, detract from learning. To mitigate distraction, after the page text is read, we then allow a child to interact with the hotspots. We also believe in utilizing a word-by-word highlighting as the text is read out loud in order to support early literacy skills.

In addition to developing best practices for preschoolers, we also take into consideration the parent and how to support co-play between children and adults. In the majority of our apps, we provide parent tips on how to extend the learning experience, and also ways to enrich the digital experience. For example, we have learned that parents want tips to be quick and easy to read. They also want the ability to customize and control the experience for their child by being able to turn the interactivity and audio on and off. Parents also like being able to record and narrate a storybook app or ebook in their own voice.

We hope that our best practices report will serve as a guide to those designing educational experiences for children through touch devices. To read the entire report, click here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Since 2005 Sesame Workshop has been committed to an initiative called Healthy Habits for Life in which we promote healthy eating, physical activity and rest and relaxation. At the start of that initiative we brought several child nutrition and health experts in to help craft our messages. We also conducted our own research into children’s perceptions of healthy eating as well as the influence of characters on food choice. In an initial pilot study that was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development in 2005, we found that placing an Elmo sticker on a picture of broccoli increased children’s self reported preference for that broccoli, enough so that it became equal to a piece of chocolate.

In a larger follow up study published online in April in the Journal of Health Communication we found that although stickers of Elmo and other favorite characters did not increase the appeal of healthy foods equal to that of more sugary or salty snacks, we were able to increase the appeal of any food when it contained a sticker of a Sesame Street character compared to a different food without a character or with an unknown character. Moreover, children were more likely to taste pieces of a healthy food when it was labeled with Elmo.

Researchers tell us that it can take around 10-15 times for children to acclimate to an unknown food, especially those that are not naturally sugary. The more strategies that parents and caregivers can use to make those attempts to try new foods more enjoyable, the more likely children may be to persevere.  Decorating plates and cups with stickers of favorite characters, character signage and activities in grocery stores, or arranging vegetables in characters likeness, which we have seen on Pinterest, may be particularly useful ways to encourage healthy eating.

For policy makers and food companies, the accumulation of research on young children, food and branded characters is particularly informative. To ensure that our young children are receiving their daily nutritional needs, we can all be creative about how we recommend and use the characters children trust, respect and love to promote healthy behaviors.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Take the recently updated version of our first book app for iPad, The Monster at the End of This Book, based on the classic book of the same name. Although the app, made in collaboration with Callaway Digital Arts, was tested before release to ensure that it was educational, navigable and entertaining, we received feedback suggesting some parents and children were not fully utilizing the app’s user interface. Even little hiccups can hamper the effectiveness of an app’s educational aims, so our research team went back and took another look at it. They found there were ways to make the app even more user-friendly.

For instance, the app already included tips for parents — ways they could work with their kids to help the app’s lessons really sink in. But research and analytics suggested that parents were not clicking on the parent tips, which were located on each separate page. A parent has to decide whether or not to utilize the advice we give, but it was important that they at least knew it was there. So instead of putting parent tips on pages where reading them could interrupt the story, they are now accessed from the splash screen users encounter when first opening the app. They’re also more visible to parents.

In the first version (left), parent tips were seen on each individual page. In the updated version they can be seen on the opening screen.

This is just one example of several tweaks that were made to The Monster at the End of This Book: The introductory video was edited so it could be skipped, in case it had been previously watched; the connection to the iTunes app purchasing page was moved behind a locking feature so that it was more difficult for young children to accidentally access it; certain icons now only need to be clicked once in order to activate them, instead of twice. As these updates were being made, they were also included in the app Another Monster at the End of This Book, the sequel to the first iPad book app.

Updating apps to ensure they’re easily navigable and highly educational is just another example of the many ways Sesame Workshop places our educational goals and rigorous commitment to research at the forefront of everything we do.

To download The Monster at the End of This Book, click here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Our mission at Sesame Street isn’t just to teach children numbers and letters. Encouraging socio-emotional development is also a major part of our curriculum. In particular, our goal is to encourage “self-regulation.” It’s a term our early childhood education experts use to describe a person’s ability to control his or her thoughts, actions and emotions.

Happiness, sadness, anger: These are all emotions that children feel. But they need to be taught to identify what they’re feeling if they’re going to respond productively. For instance, if a child has a toy taken away by another child, he needs to recognize what he is feeling – anger – before he can decide how to respond. Instead of, say, hitting the child who took his toy, if he knows he is angry he can realize that he has options for his behavior. One option would be to take a deep breath and ask for his toy back. Recognizing and labeling his emotions is a critical “skill” for a child to develop if he is going to think and then act instead of merely reacting.

Anger is a simple emotion, but self-regulation is also about identifying more complex emotions: pride, excitement, frustration, etc. At a Sesame Workshop curriculum seminar, an educational advisor once told a story about when her daughter came home and said she was angry. Her mom asked why and the girl said because a friend at school had a pink, sparkly coat that she wanted. Her mom told her she wasn’t angry, she was jealous. Identifying subtle differences between emotions like anger and jealousy is critical if a child is going to learn to be self-regulatory.

Identifying and managing one’s emotions and having self-control is just one aspect of self-regulation, but it is important when helping children develop social-emotional competence and achieve academic success. If a child learns self-regulation skills at an early age, it can help them be better prepared for school and for life. That’s why, when teaching children the building blocks of numeracy and literacy, we also help them learn social and emotional skills.

The Sesame Workshop Blog