In addition to screening a short documentary about Pittsburgh playgrounds,  visitors can participate in hands on activities including:

Where We Play and What We Play With – An artistic exercise  that challenges participants to draw their favorite place to play or item to play with. Photos will also be accepted and added to a large wall mural.

Designing a Playground – A photo display of play spaces from around the city and the world that invites participates to observe and design a blueprint for their dream play space.

Constructing a Playground – After observing the kindergarten’s model play spaces, participants can then use recycled and re-purposed materials to create their own model.

It’s great to see more community discussion on the topic of play, a theme Spark is exploring through Show & Tell, the Spark Creative Challenge that invites people to share images, stories, and recordings of how kids play in Kidsburgh.

We hope you’ll attend this exciting event at Environmental Charter School and then add your voice to this important regional discussion!

Environmental Charter School is located at 829 Milton Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15218. For more information, call 412-247-7970.

Hope to see you there!

The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh is looking for young photographers to represent the Pittsburgh region and the United States for the International Heritage Photographic Experience, (IHPE), an enormous project involving 200,000 in 66 countries spanning across 4 continents.

Interpreting the theme of heritage in the broadest possible sense, young photographers have captured nearly 1.3 million photographs celebrating the uniqueness of their home regions. Now is your chance to participate as Pittsburgh has been invited to represent the U.S. as the first and only American entrant.

Winners receive a trip to the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg, France to present live and print exhibitions of their work. More information and entry instructions can be found on the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh website.

This is a great opportunity for everyone who has been capturing their world as part of the ongoing Spark Creative Challenge Show & Tell and we hope it will inspire the children and youth of Pittsburgh to take a creative view of their hometown.

Starting this Saturday, January 30, 2010,  the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh opens a new exhibit celebrating all things Pittsburgh with hands-on activities that let kids repair one of the city’s renowned bridges, design their own fireworks display, create new Pittsburghese phrases, invent a wacky sandwich … and much more!

The weekend-long activities include featured programming from the Toonseum’s Joe Wos who will be debuting his recently supported Micro Spark project Out of the Box and Onto the Wall — a radical new interactive experience that transforms YOU into a famous Pittsburgher.

Don’t miss it! The exhibition runs from 10:00AM to 5:00PM both Saturday and Sunday.

PS – Share your very own play experiences with us at Show & Tell, the Spark Creative Challenge. We’re looking for stories, photos, videos, audio recordings, drawings, anything about kids and play. It’s easy and it’s fun so don’t delay — Visit SparkCreativeChallenge.org today!

Today, there are 55 kiosks in 35 different hospital waiting rooms in 23 states across the country. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh alone has purchased 14 of the machines.

Coming out of Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, the Electric Owl team are making an impact on the lives of young children by applying the lessons they learned designing video games to improve the hospital visit experience for children.

The project began with a fairly simple problem: How do you make a trip to the hospital less tedious and miserable for children? Children’s asked the ETC for ideas. A few students came up with a touch-screen video-game system, loaded with fun, easy-to-learn games.

Great to see these seeds of innovation and collaboration beginning to grow in Pittsburgh’s youth-serving and technology sectors. Way to go Electric Owl!

Read the story – “Kids in hospitals get a KICK out of interactive game system“

One article highlights a school in New Haven that is utilizing art installations as teaching tools for math and science. The school, which was constructed last year, has integrated all kinds of high-quality art works into its building, including sculptures, mosaics, and architectural elements. This is part of a growing movement of schools commissioning “museum-quality” works that form the basis for learning activities inside and outside of the classroom.  What I found so fascinating about this article was not just the notion that environment plays an indirect role in productivity (i.e. – when we work in pleasant and engaging surroundings, we are inspired to work better and harder), but the idea that a school building could be designed in such a way to directly facilitate learning.

The other article in this week’s Times explored how kindergarten and pre-school classrooms are engaging their children in activities designed to promote “executive function” (which, I learned in the article, is a fancy term for self-control). According to the article, assignments and tasks that force children to manage their impulses on their own – instead of being regulated by adults – can help them to develop  variety of cognitive skills that enhance future academic and professional success. It is also easier to teach kids executive function when they are young; by middle school it becomes very difficult to modify these kinds of behaviors. The most amazing the article revealed, though, is that researchers have discovered the best way to promote executive function in young children is to allow them to play. But, according to the article, kids need

not just any play. The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.

With Making Sparks just around the corner, both of these stories gave me a lot to think about in terms what kinds of projects have the best potential to impact on kids in our region. There is a fluidity and a connectedness in children’s experiences that disappears as we get older. Play, learning, feeling, socializing all blend together and influence one another, and it seems as though the best interventions and innovations are those that impact children in a way that is holistic and organic – letting them develop self-control by playing dress up or learn about science by looking at a sculpture. Hopefully Making Sparks, with it emphasis on collaboration, will yield some similarly creative ideas.

At Making Sparks, you will have a chance to:

• Participate in interactive brainstorming sessions and panel discussions featuring experts in technology, play, education, and early childhood development.
• Connect with innovators and stakeholders to expand your network into the worlds of technology, arts, education, media and more.
• Develop your ideas for projects in collaborative ideation sessions and learn how you can apply for a Super Spark.

Register today. Light dinner and refreshments will be provided.

Hope to see you at Making Sparks!

Spark’s projects use technology to enrich the lives of children with a wide array of rich interactive experiences, from outdoor exploration to parental communication. The four following projects are the first to receive Spark support.

• Message from Me from the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon University – A communication system that allows children to share their daily experiences with parents and family using every day technologies including cell phones, the Internet, and digital photography. Awarded $15,000.
• Geocaching Curriculum from Venture Outdoors – An innovative curriculum that trains child care providers and educators to utilize geocaching GPS units in their classrooms for outdoor activities and real-life treasure hunts. Awarded $7,330.
• Story Box Project from SLB Radio Productions, Inc. – A classroom initiative to work with pre-kindergarten classrooms at two Pittsburgh Public School to create electronic, interactive story-telling devices featuring students’ narrative audio recordings and original artwork. Awarded $7,600.
• Light Education at the Mattress Factory –A yearlong education program using the museum’s James Turrell light installations to teach elementary school students and teachers from 20 Allegheny County Schools about the science of light, scientific inquiry and experimentation, and the connections between artistic expression and scientific concepts. Awarded $7,500.

Spark will offer three more funding cycles in 2009, investing a total of $200,000 in projects that will unleash the innovative potential of Southwestern Pennsylvania and transform our region into one of the best places on earth for children to live, learn, and play.

During the two hour event, media literacy specialist Teresa Foley gave a presentation on her work connecting technology to education and everyday media experiences. Teresa’s work centers on the use of accessible, affordable commercial technologies – digital cameras or camcorders, for example – to promote learning and creative expression among kids and adults. In one particularly interesting project, she used video recording as a mirroring tool for pre-school children. She recorded various classroom literacy activities, like story-time or name writing, and then playing them back to children on a television in the pre-school. Watching themselves on the TV reinforced the children’s literacy activities and reinforced other positive classroom behaviors. She also gave a preview of a current project she is beginning in conjunction with local technology firm deepLocal, an easy-to-use system for individuals to record and create their own cell phone ring tones.

Check out a video from Teresa’s work with preschoolers here.

After Teresa’s presentation, guests shared their professional and personal experiences with technology and education and discussed the challenges and opportunities associated with bringing technology into the lives of young children. They also learned more about how to get involved with Spark.

For those of you who couldn’t make it, don’t worry – this was onlythe first of many! Spark Starters will take place every other month at venues around Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. For specific dates and locations, just look at the Spark Calendar.

If you are interested in hosting or attending a Spark Starter, please email me at spark@sproutfund.org.

Green practices, technology, and design play a big role in making the new hospital more inviting. Bright colors and animal themes are used to differentiate wards and floors. Patient rooms are designed to look and feel like a child’s bedroom and provide ample space for visitors, as well as areas where parents can rest. Glass-walled playrooms allow patients to remain connected to the rest of the hospital, even if they have to remain secluded from visitors. The center of this new family focus is a huge multi-purpose atrium with a descending movie screen and an adjacent garden pavilion that offers views of Lawrenceville and Oakland, which is also connected to a 20,000 square foot family resource center. Administrative buildings, doctors’ offices and parking garages will also be a part of the new campus.

In addition to its thoughtful design plan and use of space, I was really impressed with the many ways that technology was integrated into the new hospital facility. There are several  technology features that will significantly improve the patient experience for both children and caregivers, including: game consoles where kids can play while waiting to be seen by their doctors, TV monitors in waiting areas that update parents on their children’s status while in surgery (and are refreshed every 30 seconds), digital signage at each elevator, and fully digitized medical records. Wireless internet access is available throughout the building. And, of course, Children’s will be employing the most state-of-the-art technology in their medical services to ensure the highest quality of care.

The new Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh opens on May 2, 2009.

For more information, check out the Children’s Hospital’s website.

Spark provides funding for projects and initiatives that will energize children ages birth to eight in the creative use of technology and the media. Individuals, organizations, teachers, startups, artists—everyone, actually—will be challenged to think about early childhood education and technology in a new,exciting way.

“We want to use technology to empower and engage children and promote interaction between kids and the adults in their lives,” explains Jocelyn Horner, Sparks program manager.

Projects need not be technically daunting, she adds. It can be something as simple as finding a new way to use digital cameras in a preschool class. “We want to turn technology on its head and use it in a powerful way for kids.”

via Pop City – Spark lights the creative, high-tech spirit of children and young families