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3 Educational Games to Make October Magical

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FableVision wishes you a spooky and pumpkin-spiced fall! Leave the lemonade and cherry popsicles behind in favor of a caramel apple and a stroll under the changing leaves. We warmly welcome the season with our new fall banner designed by FableVision lead artist Christina Kelly. As we embark on a school term that looks different from previous years, FableVision is here to help keep learning fun and festive! 

To celebrate the most mystical month of the year, we invite you to play some of our current favorite games. As you get cozy in the colder weather, fly over to different worlds from the comfort of your home. 

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Creep it real with Cyberchase Fractions Quest 

Encounter monsters and excitingly challenging math problems with Cyberchase Fractions Quest! Students join the CyberSquad to defeat villain Hacker while learning fractions and strengthening their problem-solving skills in a series of minigames. This math learning game is based on the popular and award-winning PBS KIDS show CyberChase and combines research-based methods with a high-stakes adventure story for grades 3 and 4 fractions learning. The beta version is available for free for a limited time on FableVision Games. And keep an eye out for our full release of the game later this fall!

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Leaf planet Earth behind in Galaxia 

Hang out with aliens as you stop an evil plot that’s threatening your out-of-this-world boarding school complete with futuristic laboratories, hybrid animals, and floating cafes. Created in partnership with National Health Promotion Associates (NHPA), Galaxia is a bullying prevention game that invites students to work through scenarios surrounding peer pressure, bullying, coping with stress, and more in connection to the evidence-based LifeSkills Training middle school curriculum. Students’ choices in the game affect the trajectory of their path, teaching them the impact that their actions have in order to prevent bullying in all forms. 

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Trick or treat yourself with Make That Paper 

Lace up your work boots and slip on your favorite flannel as you join a team of woodland animals to run a forestry business. Created in partnership with Georgia Public Broadcasting Education and the Georgia Forestry Foundation, Make That Paper: Careers in Forestry invites high school students to strengthen their career employability skills while learning about the forestry industry. As they soak in the woodsy fall aesthetic, students can interview Deidra Deering, collaborate with Bobbi Bear, review Gabriella Greentree’s resume, and apply forestry science knowledge to industry-related scenarios. Will you succeed in sustainably and efficiently managing your business?

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September FableFriday: Sam Bissonnette, Producer

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Samantha “Sam” Bissonnette is holding educational media to a high standard – and it’s an interactive one. The newest producer at the studio, Sam is no stranger to FableVision, having spent time honing her skills as a 2013 intern in our marketing department. Since then, Sam has ventured deeper into media production, managing streaming content on the digital team at PBS KIDS, working as a production assistant on shows like WordGirl and Astroblast!, and consulting with Sesame Workshop on innovating in the early education field. After graduating from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE), Sam returns to FableVision armed with a renewed passion for producing educational media. Among other things, she’s constantly thinking about how our favorite properties positively impact our lives – no matter your age.

“I’m really excited about interactive experiences through streaming media. Specifically, there’s a lot of conversation that says TV is a passive experience, and I disagree – the best shows and stories start conversation and action,” Sam shares. “People feel moved to make fan art, express their thoughts about characters online, or host viewing parties. I’m really excited to be able to think about harnessing this excitement at FableVision Studios and make it easier for people to interact with media, especially in an educational space.”

Pull up a chair and get to know Sam’s thoughts on personalized learning, rich production past, and her enthusiastic love for food, Pokémon, and a certain BIG puppy in this month’s FableFriday.

Sam, tell us about your journey to FableVision story!
My journey (back!) to FableVision started after my internship with the marketing team here in 2013. Inspired to continue working in the edtech industry, I worked several different jobs in the children’s media space and finished graduate school. I heard there was a job opening at FableVision Studios so I interviewed with Executive Producer Karen Bresnahan and Senior Producer Peter Stidwill. Before I knew it, I was welcomed back into the FableVision team!

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The role of producer is often mysterious as they’re creatively working behind the scenes to pull everything together. Can you give us a crash course on your role at FableVision?
Producers at FableVision have the exciting task of managing projects that come in all shapes and sizes. We think about the project as a whole and work to keep the client’s vision at the forefront of the team’s mind every step of the way. Producers have a hand in shaping and guiding each project towards delivery. I get to constantly learn more about art, tech, and design – all things I love! At FableVision, we’re fortunate to work on a broad range of media, so every day and every project feels different.

As a producer you have to stay organized, what’s your trick?
I like to record everything as much as possible – I have three notebooks, one schedule book, and lots of calendars! I can type pretty quickly too, so I tend to transcribe meetings and conversations whenever possible.

What’s a favorite project that you’re working on now?
It’s so hard to choose! FableVision’s work with The Good Project is especially important to me. Through research-based concepts, frameworks, and resources, The Good Project seeks to help students reflect upon the ethical dilemmas that arise in everyday life and give them the tools to make thoughtful decisions. It was my first kickoff as a part of the FableVision team, and it ties perfectly with my experience at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Plus it involves a lot of content I feel passionate about, like social/emotional development.

Hats off to the new graduate! You recently matriculated from HGSE, tell us about what you studied in the Technology, Innovation, and Education (TIE) program?
As a member of the 2017 TIE cohort, I explored courses in design, entrepreneurship, animation, inclusive education, race and culture in education, and of course, children’s media! The program is really hands-on, so it involved a lot of awesome group projects and collaboration with students from a variety of professional backgrounds. I feel really fortunate to have spent a year growing professionally in such a supportive and creative environment.

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Before heading off to grad school, you managed the streaming content on the digital team at PBS KIDS. What are some of the insights you gleaned from curating digital content for kids?
The PBS KIDS Video app is so successful in part because it has such great design, and it’s really made with the target audience in mind. It was important for our team to constantly be thinking about how our young audience was seeing our videos. One interesting thing we realized was that marking a video as “new” didn’t necessarily alert kids to brand new content – partly because we have a lot of early readers as viewers. This meant that we could regularly repurpose content along with current pieces to maintain a level of variety.

You spent some time teaching in the classroom. Do you have any takeaways from your time as a teacher?
My time as a preschool teacher was so valuable and it shapes the way I understand, think about, and appreciate children and early educators. As a child development major in undergrad I had a firm understanding of why early education is so important, but being a part of that growth really brought it home for me. Children zero to five can do so much more than I had imagined. Plus, they’re imaginative, creative, honest, and fun. Early educators are smart, dedicated, and passionate people that deserve all our support. 

Who are some industry folks that you’re following these days and how do they inspire you to follow your North Star?Women in media like Rebecca Sugar, Issa Rae, and the ladies of Broad City and 2DopeQueens who are leading the way in their genres are all really inspiring to me. They let their own unique perspectives be their creative guide rather than trying to make more of what is already out there.

Last year's Extra Life team at FableVision Studios

Last year's Extra Life team at FableVision Studios

This is your first year gaming for good and raising funds for Boston Children’s Hospital with us for Extra Life! Why are you excited to join our team?
I’m super excited for Extra Life! Boston is my home and I’m proud that Boston Children’s Hospital is one of the best hospitals in the country. I’m excited to support an organization that brings so much necessity and good into the lives of kids and their families. I’m also looking forward to working with Team FableVision to beat our goal of $6,000!


 

Who is Kovu?
Kovu the dog! My fiancé Andy and I adopted Kovu as a rescue puppy a few years ago while we were living outside D.C. He’s nostalgically named after Kovu from Lion King 2, because we both happened to love the movie as kids and it’s such a great name! Kovu is about 90 lbs, and we think a Boxer, Great Pyrenees, Staffordshire mix. Maybe. He’s very lovable, strange, lazy, sleepy, and friendly. He loves belly rubs, playing with little kids, and swimming in lakes. He’s always making us laugh and we love him a lot!

As a traveling foodie, tell us about the top three international places to visit and eat our way through.

More about Sam!

Hogwarts house: I want to say Gryffindor, but I think I’m a Hufflepuff.
Your current jam: Bright Whites by Kishi Bashi
Current read: My professor’s book – The Diversity Bargain by Natasha Warikoo
Best Cartoon Ever: Ohhhhh, don’t make me choose! If I have to, my favorite anime is School Live! (Gakkō Gurashi!)
Food that makes you look like a cooking connoisseur: My Cincinnati Chili! (Thanks, America’s Test Kitchen!)
Greatest holiday: Halloween!!!!
Favorite Pokemon: Vulpix (fire types forever!) 
Tell us a joke: This is my favorite thing on the internet.
Hands-down the best sports team:  The Tufts Women’s Track and Field team!

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June FableFriday: Mia Doces, Director of New Mission Ventures at Committee for Children

Mia Doces lives and works by the “walk a mile in someone else's shoes” idiom. Turns out there’s a fair amount of perspective taking that comes with developing classroom tools that teach empathy and social-emotional learning (SEL) skills—but that comes as no surprise to the Director of New Mission Ventures at Committee for Children.

FableVision has partnered with Committee for Children on the award-winning ParkPals: Kindness Rules game, which teaches SEL and anti-bullying skills like fair play, responsibility, safety, and respect for 2nd and 3rd graders. As a former classroom educator, Mia has brought her expertise and experience to a number of like-minded environments and organizations such as Sesame Workshop and the Born This Way Foundation.

“For every product I’ve developed I put myself in the shoes of the users and imagine how the tool or the curriculum or the program is both helping kids and also making a teacher’s life easier,” Mia explains. “That’s always the starting place, but of course we test in classrooms because they are dynamic and unpredictable.”

Walk a mile in Mia’s shoes to learn more her adventures—from Committee for Children’s mission-driven work to hunting for the latest edtech tools and innovation, to traversing across America to find delectable donuts, to her riveting tales of bulls and carnivals in the rugged, rainforested land of Costa Rica.  

Committee for Children's Second Step program suite of resources

Committee for Children's Second Step program suite of resources

Committee for Children is a global non-profit dedicated to fostering the safety and well-being of children. Tell us more about the organization’s guiding principles.
Committee for Children’s mission is to foster the safety and well-being of children through social and emotional learning and development. We do that through both advocacy and education. The core work of the organization is to develop and disseminate evidence-based, social-emotional learning programs that are fun and engaging for young people and easy for educators to implement. The programs are developmentally specific to grade level and are aligned with best practice pedagogy.

You currently explore new avenues for broadening Committee for Children’s mission impact as the Director of New Mission Ventures. What does that role entail?
I spend a good deal of time out in the field talking and listening. I look for organizations and individuals who are taking innovative approaches to improving outcomes for kids and families. I look for opportunities to partner with others to help address unmet needs, especially when it comes to underserved populations. I consider how emerging technologies, like VR for example, might enhance or harm young people’s ability to learn empathy and social skills.

Then, the NMV team explores and experiments with new ideas—seeking to test hypotheses and continuing to iterate as proof of concept advances. In some cases, those hypotheses turn into actual products that our teams develop.

Mia Doces on the  Anti-Bullying Panel at Sesame Workshop

Mia Doces on the  Anti-Bullying Panel at Sesame Workshop

You’ve been in the education space for a long time, first as an educator, then working with Committee for Children. How has your teaching experience informed the work that you do?
I know first-hand how demanding and difficult—and rewarding!—it is to be an educator. Sometimes you imagine something, say a lesson, working one way and you try it out in a real classroom and realize you hadn’t accounted for one factor or another and it turns out completely differently than what you’d expected. There’s so much iteration and retesting that needs to happen. Having been an educator really helps with the notion that even in the workplace you need to constantly be a learner.

As technology continues to expand, how do you see digital tools boosting social and emotional skills in teaching and learning?
I think digital tools are most effective when they support and scaffold adult-child interactions, especially when it comes to teaching and learning SEL skills. Most adults do not necessarily feel like “experts” in the field of social and emotional learning. We make curricula and tools that are simple and fun to implement, allowing the adults to really learn alongside the children. Among the many goals of our programs are sparking relevant conversations, helping adults provide “in the moment” scaffolding to children as they work through challenges and creating a structure for skill practicing in a supported environment.

You were a key member in bringing the Second Step program to life. How does Second Step support and optimize SEL learning to improve student outcomes?
Second Step is a multi-component, research-based social and emotional skill-building program. The unique lessons at every grade level are carefully created and presented in an order that helps students build skills over the course of the school year. The elementary school program begins with a unit called Skills for Learning, in which children learn about and practice skills and strategies for becoming great learners. The activities are based in neuroscience, building executive function capacity via games and reflections. Then, children build skills in empathy and compassion, practicing skills like perspective taking and offering help. As the program progresses, students learn skills in recognizing emotions, regulating strong feelings, friendship-making, social problems solving, and a host of other skills and competencies that are integral for success in school and in life.

In addition to student-facing lessons, there are many resources for teachers, counselors, administrators and parents that give them the tools they need to support a child’s social and emotional growth.

How did Committee for Children come to cross paths with FableVision?
I met Gary Goldberger at a Serious Play conference a few years ago. We were excited to discover we had worked with a number of the same colleagues on aligned projects. Gary has great energy and humor in addition to deep roots in children’s media, so I knew he and FableVision would be great thought and work partners.

Studies show that mindfulness in the classroom can help create a happy, calm, and positive culture. How did you come up with the concept for Mind Yeti?
For years we’ve known about the benefits of a mindfulness practice for adults. But the research about the benefits of mindfulness for children was still nascent, albeit encouraging. We saw an opportunity to not only enrich the Second Step experience in the classroom by strengthening attention and calming skills through mindfulness exercises, but we also saw an opportunity to create a product that could easily bridge the home-school divide.

We designed Mind Yeti to be as easy to use and effective in the home as well as the classroom. To do this, we knew we wanted to create a light narrative that would both engage children and help them understand some of the fundamental components and benefits of mindfulness exercises. We did a lot of testing with young people to help guide our creation of the Yeti character, Yeti’s world and the Hubbubbles. The audio sessions include a diversity of voices and everyday sounds that help them feel interesting and familiar to kids. We have a saying that we strive to go “beyond the gong” and really make this experience relevant to the lives of today’s youth.

Are there new projects on Committee for Children’s horizon that you’re excited about?
There are so many! But one I’m particularly excited about is an experiment we’re doing within a Minecraft multi-player space. We’ve partnered with Connected Camps (Katie Salen and Mimi Ito) to explore how SEL content might be embedded in virtual environments. Situated within the social space of a Minecraft server, the peer-mediation program explores ways in which kids can develop problem-solving skills in the face of authentic and naturally arising conflict. The server allows many kids to play together in a shared virtual space, providing a framework for conflict resolution and communication tools. The program will pair SEL-infused online moderation strategies with a scaffolded conflict resolution program. It is being designed for middle school youth participating in afterschool programs.

We hear that you are quite a voracious traveler. Tell us an adventure story from your travels!
Recently, I was in the Arenal region of Costa Rica. When I travel I like to find events or activities that the locals enjoy, so when I heard a traveling rodeo was in the nearby town and that it was a big deal for locals, I had to go. When we got there, we found a rickety arena set up with lots of families in the stands, kids climbing all over the structure and, in the middle of the arena, there was a large group of children playing typical carnival games—wheelbarrow races, three legged races, etc. We thought it was a bit strange that an entire arena was set up for spectators to watch this. Until…they let out the bull. On the children.

Before we really realized what was happening we found ourselves watching a large group of children practicing what could only be described as rodeo clown training; taking turns trying to touch the bull or running wilding around it, attempting (not always successfully) to not get trampled. For the only two Americans in the crowd, the spectacle was terrifying—No helmets! No pads! But for the locals it was terribly exciting. And best of all—no one was seriously hurt!

Speaking of travels, rumor has it that you’re a foodie. What are some of your favorite spots to chow down in your hometown of Seattle, Washington…and around the globe?
I do have a notorious sweet tooth, so a 1 a.m. Voodoo Donut in Austin, Texas with Gary Goldberger and crew is always a delight! If you’re visiting Seattle and you’re a foodie, you’re in for a treat! There are so many great restaurants to choose from! If you’re looking for great NW seafood in fun locations try:

Spotlight on ParkPals: Kindness Rules

with Rachel Kamb, Senior Program Developer
at Committee for Children

What was your experience like working with FableVision on ParkPals: Kindness Rules?
It was great to collaborate with such an experienced team. At Committee for Children, our primary focus is on teaching social-emotional learning skills and concepts to students in the classroom. A game-based product is a new approach for us. Bringing their expertise together with ours was a fun and creative process.

With a focus on bullying prevention, how does ParkPals aim to create a safe and supportive environment for kids
ParkPals was designed to focus on the behaviors and attitudes that prevent bullying from happening: respect, responsibility, fairness, and safety. These behaviors and attitudes support a positive social climate. Creating a positive social climate helps children feel safer and sets the expectation that they will treat each other with respect. It can reduce the likelihood of bullying and help students feel more comfortable reporting bullying if it happens. ParkPals is a virtual playground where children can practice these skills that contribute to a safe environment in safe space.

Join us for a discussion on
digital learning and SEL tools at ISTE!

Hear more from the ParkPals development team! Join FableVision and Committee for Children in San Antonio at ISTE for a session on fostering empathetic learning experiences in the classroom and at home. Committee for Children’s Rachel Kamb and FableVision’s Gary Goldberger and Leigh Hallisey will share insights on merging content with gaming to develop social-emotional competencies and reduce bullying.

What: Empathy Empowers: Digital Learning Strategies
When: Wednesday, June 28, 1 p.m. in San Antonio, TX

Click here for more session info!

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Rock the Vote: Get FableVision and Committee for Children to SXSWedu 2017!

Committee for Children (CFC) and FableVision are hoping to bring our team of experts to SXSWedu to give educators the digital tools they need to make empathy the forefront of a child’s development in a media-rich world. And we need your help to get there. Yes, you!

How can you help?

  1. Head to SXSWedu’s website here.
  2. Make an account to view our session. 
  3. Rock Your Vote! (Voting ends Sept. 2)
  4. Share with your social network via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, you name it.

Link to vote: Empathy Empowers: Digital Learning Strategies

So, what’ll we be talking about?
Kids spend a lot of time online developing social-emotional skills within the digital space; the lack of face-to-face contact makes it easier to be “mean,” often without consequences. Leveraging research, psychology, and media, Committee for Children and FableVision are using educational media as an antidote. With built-in opportunities for failure and success, media helps kids understand how they can take ownership of creating a positive climate conducive to learning in a respectful and supportive environment. Educational specialists and developers will share insights and statistics on merging content with media, and discuss how it can promote empathic, ethical decision-making in kids.

“The great thing about this partnership is the seamless merging of content and engaging gameplay,” says Rachel Kamb of Committee for Children. “Our teams have worked really hard to create quality media and can’t wait to share our findings with the SXSWedu community.”

Who are the experts?

 
 

What can you learn?

  1. Tips to create a safe space online, where kids can act freely, be entertained, and challenge and enrich moral development without sacrificing agency.
  2. Get insights and statistics on merging content with rich media; discuss various media resources geared toward numerous age groups to promote kindness.
  3. Learn strategies on using media to reinforce social-emotional learning and bullying prevention skills and concepts both in the classroom and home.

What are some things you can expect to see?

  • How learning games like Committee for Children’s ParkPals (developed by FableVision) promotes learning kindness, created to address bullying.
  • More media and resources produced by Committee for Children and FableVision that encourage empathy and personal development.

Get your vote out and spread the word!

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