Why Kids Should Help Design EdTech: Inside the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's Co-Design Movement

Michael Preston, Executive Director, Medha Tare, Senior Director of Research, and Liza Gak, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, are leading researchers focused on child-centered educational technology. Together, they are helping edtech organizations design better products by combining learning science, participatory co-design, and thoughtful approaches to AI.

💡 5 Things You'll Learn in This Episode

1.  Why involving children early in product design leads to better edtech. 
2.  How the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's co-design methodology differs from traditional user testing. 
3.  What children's feedback reveals about AI tutors, reading buddies, and learning experiences. 
4.  Why learning science and child-centered design should guide AI-powered products. 
5.  Practical ways edtech teams can adopt co-design to build more engaging and effective learning tools. 

✨ Episode Highlights
[00:03:35] Introducing the Co-Design with Kids Toolkit and why child-centered design starts before user testing.
[00:06:22] How learning science and the Translating Literacy Research to EdTech framework shape stronger products.
[00:11:14] What participatory co-design actually looks like in practice.
[00:20:53] Surprising insights from children including why "less is more" with AI.
[00:24:15] How educators and product teams should think differently about AI in learning.
[00:31:53] Practical advice for bringing co-design into every stage of product development.
[00:39:20] What's next for AI, child-centered design, and the future of edtech. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Alex Sarlin: This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. Every year, K-12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars, but most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts, and strategic plans, and then helps you turn them into personalized outreach fast.

Win the deal before it hits the RFP stage. That's how top edtech teams stay ahead. 

[00:00:31] Medha Tare: One of the themes I think that's coming out is that less is more, particularly when it comes to AI. Not all kids want a tutor that is ever present or too chatty or interrupting the learning process and their flow. And of course, we're still learning how any of that kind of interaction can impact learning long term.

And so I think it's really interesting to see the variation amongst kids and how they want those sorts of supports to show up in products, and it's something that we're tracking definitely over the many different partnerships that we have

[00:01:08] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K-12, higher ed, and work, you'll find it all here at Edtech Insiders. 

[00:01:24] Ben Kornell: Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar.

And to go deeper, check out Edtech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back-channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod

[00:01:48] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Edtech Insiders. We have a fantastic group of guests today from the very important Joan Ganz Cooney Center, always doing incredibly cutting-edge work in co-design, in research. This team has so much to say about it. Let me introduce Michael Preston, PhD. He's the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center.

It's an independent research and innovation lab at Sesame Workshop dedicated to ensuring that digital and AI-powered technologies serve children's best interests. With 25 years of experience in cognitive science and edtech, he has led the center's focus on child-centered design and the systemic conditions that turn research into practice We have Medha Tare, PhD.

She's the senior director of research at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, and her work addresses the needs of the whole child, including impacts of individual differences among learners, their environments, and the media through which they learn. She currently leads the Cooney Center Sandbox, very important in today's conversation, an initiative to center children's voices in the design of technology and media.

And last but not least, we have Liza Gak, PhD, a researcher and designer who engages youth in community-based participatory co-design. She is a post-doctoral fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, leading initiatives that center children at the forefront of educational technology design. Welcome all of you, Michael, Medha, and Liza to Edtech Insiders.

[00:03:17] Michael Preston: Thank you, Alex. It's awesome to be here. Yeah, I think it's our third time maybe, at least for me and Medha, but we're always so happy to be on this show, and frankly, our fans and followers as well as, uh, participants, so thank you. 

[00:03:29] Liza Gak: Thank you for having us, Alex. We're excited to be here. Yeah, thank you. It's my first time on the podcast, so I'm really excited.

[00:03:35] Alex Sarlin: Well, I'm incredibly excited to talk to all of you. You're always doing really interesting work, and one of the big announcements recently was this development of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's co-design toolkit, which is, you can tell us all about it, but it's really designed to sort of spread the philosophy that you bring to this incredible work more widely and give people tools to be able to do this kind of hands-on co-design.

So Michael, let's start with you. Tell us about the toolkit and what gap that you saw in the edtech space that inspired you to really make sure that children's voices are centered when it comes to edtech design. 

[00:04:12] Michael Preston: Thanks so much, Alex. This work has emerged from a practice we've undertaken for the last five years or so.

You mentioned the Sandbox Product Lab. It is our incubator for early stage edtech ideas early in the process before lots of decisions are made, when we can bring in the science of learning and whole child approaches and those sorts of things. And we found that the idea of child-centered was adopted broadly and not always very specific and toward the kind of impact that we were intending for that.

And through the Sandbox over the years, we were very intentionally adopting a practice of co-designing with children Based in a tradition of cooperative inquiry that has this whole history unto itself. But Alison Druin's lab in the '90s at University of Maryland turned this into a repeatable thing through Kids Team, an after-school program that she ran there, and then her graduate students now run all over the country.

And so we adopted this as one component of this broader process to help make kind of early stage-- an early stage intervention into new edtech products where we could really expand and concretize people's notion of child-centered design. So not just user testing, not just feedback, but something early and meaningful in the process that could be-- make real even transformative changes so that products would be higher quality and actually have the impact that was intended, but also take advantage of the unique insights that only kids would have.

And I would say that we're embodying Sesame's ethos or philosophy about design. You know, after 50 years plus of making very intentional research-backed media for kids, the Sandbox and this new co-design toolkit are, are ways of bringing that into the world 

[00:05:49] Alex Sarlin: I love that phrase, the unique insights that only children have.

And you're pointing out the difference between user testing and this type of really early stage co-design, which is, like, really core here. They call it participatory co-design. So Medha, tell us about the sandbox model and how you really make sure that kids are actually part of the process very early on.

What principles have you used to help edtech companies center the voices of children not too late in the process, not have an idea, think it's gonna work, build the whole thing, and then bring kids in, but get them in earlier? 

[00:06:22] Medha Tare: Thank you, Alex. Yeah, we have a model right now that we think is really working very well, and before we get to the part where we talk with kids, the first thing that we do is that we help our edtech partners ground what they're making in the vast body of research we know about how people learn.

So there's a lot of conversation right now about what makes edtech effective, and we wanna make sure that in this case we're working with a lot of literacy products, that the science of literacy is really embedded in the product. And so the goal is not to only include kids and listen to kids' voices, it's really to include the many different experts that are needed to make a good product, and kids are one of the experts that we need to include in the room.

The others are researchers, developers, educators, right? So we are wanting to bring the voices of all of those different experts into the design process. So before our partners actually engage in co-design with kids, they work closely with our literacy experts in our team, and they've just released a report on translating literacy research to edtech, so we wanna share that one out with folks as well.

But that is the core first experience that they have, and then we want to make sure you're designing things that are engaging on top of strong pedagogy, right? So once they've gone through the literacy consultations, they may have new ideas on how they can support, for example, readers who are struggling, or multilingual learners, or they have a feature that they really wanna use for, like, a read aloud function in their tool that kids aren't using, and so they can't get the good data that they need to share back with teachers if kids aren't using it.

And so they wanna bring kids in to help design that feature better, right? So it, the two work together really well. Once they get to the co-design, we really emphasize for our partners the philosophy around co-design, and that is really to be partners with the kids rather than other methods, as Michael said, where you are perhaps play testing and taking notes on what kids are doing and not engaging with them or asking them questions.

And it's a really big mindset shift for most of the designers we work with. They've never worked with kids in that way, or the kids they've worked with are their own kids or the kids of the people who work with them So they've never worked with other diverse learners who are coming with a lot of different sets of background knowledge or experiences.

And so having the opportunity to work with and not just observe a diverse group of kids using your product or ideating around new features in your product is really something new and valuable for even very seasoned developers that we work with who've been doing this for a long time. So that's a really exciting thing.

One thing I do wanna mention is that one of the things that we're doing with this project is actually collecting a lot of data around our intervention. And so we are always collecting data, for example, on the impact on the product, which we can share more about. Liza will share some examples. But we also look at the impact on the designers who participate.

So we've found that 94% of the designers who participate feel like they have personally grown in their expertise, for example, in the science of literacy, by engaging in our consultation process. So they have more knowledge to take forward in new products that they design, right, not just the one that they're working with us on.

And then 90% of the designers we work with are also highly enthusiastic about using co-design for future product development. So we're finding really more lasting impacts on the people who are gonna continue building products out in the field. 

[00:09:43] Alex Sarlin: It's really amazing. That marriage that you're explaining about marrying the pedagogical expertise with the engagement for learners, those are two of the most important elements in all edtech, but there are other elements as well.

And I think what makes your work so valuable is that every edtech founder or company or product comes with a certain amount of expertise coming in. Some people are business experts, some are coding experts, some are teachers or come from a pedagogical background, but there's always big gaps, right? No edtech founder has all of those pieces at their fingertips when they start.

And so the idea of bringing in the pedagogy experts, the science of literacy, the science of reading for tools that use it, and then bringing in students and talking about engagement and motivation and ideas, and bringing all of them together so early in the process in this participatory way, I can un- understand why you get such great results and why people feel so engaged and excited because these are different complementary areas of expertise that go in to build a solid product.

It's really cool to see. And I mean, I've interviewed many, many people on this podcast, and they all know that they have T shapes, right? They all know. They're like, "I'm great at coding," or, "I know a lot about the pedagogy, but I don't really understand what kids want." They don't say it that way, but it's in there.

And so I think putting it all together is incredibly powerful. So Liza made a mention that you are gonna talk about some of the stories of what it's actually like to work with these students. Tell us about what it looks like to work with students to build authenticity, to have them buy into the process, feel excited.

What does this actually look like when you're engaging students in co-design? 

[00:11:14] Liza Gak: Yeah. It's a lot of fun, but it's also a lot of hard work. And I think when we're thinking about edtech very broadly, I think everybody really wants to directly engage young people, but it's actually really hard to do so. That's why a lot of people can't do it.

First you need to find the kids, then you need to recruit kids, and then you need to facilitate sessions, then you need to make sense of what actually happened during the sessions, and then put everything into practice. So there's a lot of different steps involved, and you really need resources, you need time, you need expertise with people who know how to do this, and building relationships.

So there's a lot that goes into our work in directly engaging with young people, and that really starts with meeting young people where they're already at and focusing on what they're already interested in. I always say you can't just go up to a kid on the street and say, "Hey, do you wanna be in my co-design project?"

Of course, we know there's a million issues with that, so we've had to go where kids in our community already are at, and where they're at after school, where they're at on the weekends, getting to know the adults in their families and in the programs that their families already trust. And once we're already there, making sure that the sessions are grounded in their interests and what they're excited about so that they keep coming back and keep having fun and participating So in our work in Sandbox specifically, probably our most significant relationship has been with the West Side YMCA, and it's taken a lot of time and coordination to really learn about their programs and their offerings and understand where we fit best and fit authentically within their model.

So we figured out ways that we can plug into their after-school programs. And when we actually run sessions themselves, we start from kids' interests. So when we get there, we all warm up, we sit on the floor together, we start drawing on a big piece of white paper, and we all answer, that's adults and kids, we all answer the same question of the day, which helps us find common ground and get excited for what we're about to design.

But this is also a way for us throughout the session to be like, "Hey, you brought up Spider-Man. Let's do something with him." So I think there's a lot of different ways that we've been engaging with young people directly, but it's taken a lot of coordination and effort just to, like, connect with young people where they're at and also understand what they're interested in.

[00:13:57] Medha Tare: Yeah. And we wanna give a big shout-out again to the YMCA and their staff and the schools that we've worked with, as well as our really close partner, The Giant Room, who's our implementation partner for the co-design in New York City, and we definitely couldn't do this work without all of those different partners to, again, the most important thing is that the kids are having a positive experience and that they feel open to share their ideas in a way that they may not typically have an opportunity to do in a school setting or other places that they're in.

[00:14:27] Alex Sarlin: And when we hear you describe the process, the recruiting, the orientation, the trust-building, the authenticity, the actually the aligning the sessions to students' interests, it's like you can feel how much work it is, and you can start to understand why it's not as common a practice as it yet could be or should be among edtech companies without this kind of help.

But I can't tell you how many times I've been in meetings when I'm working in edtech where somebody's like, "I showed this to my kid last night, and this is what they said, so we should do this." And you're like, "No, that is really not a good way to involve kids in the process," but it's surprisingly common in edtech because it's so difficult to recruit and pull together kids who really wanna be involved in this way.

Liza, one more question for you about when you're actually in these sessions, so the drawing on paper, they're discussing, they're looking at what's out there. I'm sure you get lots of different kinds of feedback depending on where the product is. Some is probably really deep transformative feedback about how the product even works and what it's supposed to be, and some might be feedback about how something looks or feedback about how cool this character is or something like that.

I'm curious how you sort of differentiate between the different types of feedback, and again, what makes it really different coming in early in the process versus late? 'Cause I'm sure you get feedback on all levels. 

[00:15:40] Liza Gak: Yeah, absolutely. I think the thing that's really exciting to me about co-design is that it's a philosophy that really honors many multiple modes of participation.

So meeting kids, if they're more talkative and they wanna talk out their ideas and present them, or if they wanna draw their ideas and work with an adult in a group together, we're able to make all of those ideas rise to the forefront. And I think when we're thinking about different ways that edtech companies have involved kids in their product development, I think the most common one is play testing, and that's getting kids' feedback after a product has been made to see how it works, if it makes sense, if it's fun.

And this is really important, too. We actually developed a site at JJCC with resources on how to do this. It's playtestwithkids.org. So play testing is really important, but we've also been really interested in co-design, and that's been practiced in, like, academic circles, and we're excited to bring that theory and practice into edtech.

And it starts at the very beginning of a design process to collaborate with kids and include their ideas from the start of creating a product all the way through the design process. So like you said, kids will surface a lot of usability fixes like, "That button is ugly," or, "That doesn't make sense." It's really good to have that feedback to, like, make things clearer and make things more intuitive.

But a lot of the more interesting substantial changes that we've seen are around student agency and strengthening social emotional learning and just, like, learning how kids want to learn And I'll share an example from a co-design session that I thought was really exciting. So we were working with a company that's building curriculum around social studies and civics, and in those lessons, there's a lot of background knowledge that you need to have about, like, a specific historical concept or event.

So they were really interested in, like, how do students want to make sense of background knowledge, keep track of it, but also make it fun and playful? So during a co-design session, I was co-designing with a third grader who had some really good ideas. So we were designing ways to recall and keep track of background knowledge that day.

So in our group, we designed a kind of a standard mind map, and it's like you have your big topic in the center with lots of different spokes and arrows of little things you need to remember. And he was like, "This is cool, but this is boring." And I'm like, "Okay, so what kind of games do you like to play?

Like, what do you like to do?" Really kind of starting to ground in his interest because it was kind of boring. And he started telling me about this gardening game that he likes to play, and immediately he started drawing different crops and different seeds that were part of his gardening game. He's like, "So this is where the strawberries go.

This is where the carrots go." And I'm like, "Okay, let's start developing this into a knowledge game." And together we started thinking, okay, maybe you get different kind of resources with different kinds of knowledge that you remember. So you get water if you remember the year. You get fertilizer if you remember the place.

So it started to become this really rich game, and our crops started to grow, and pretty soon he was handing out seed packets that he had drawn, like, all around the classroom So from this example, the company was able to integrate insights around making this kind of learning really playful. And they said that coming into the sessions, their mindset was really around what source, what concept will make kids engaged, but it's really, like, the mode of learning and recall that only kids could really remember.

And like now the team can think about how kids can get feedback through that garden idea. So maybe your seeds start to sprout, or maybe your crops grow, or like where do you need more tending and care? And I wanna include like a little bit of side note about that instance of working with that student.

Our sessions really try to accommodate bilingual experiences and bilingual learners, so we usually have, like, Spanish-speaking staff during our sessions so that we can include students. But I was really excited because this student was our first Russian-speaking student that we have, and I grew up speaking Russian, and my family is from there.

So I got to include his perspective and his idea by working with him, so I'm really glad 'cause that wouldn't have happened if we wouldn't have developed such a focus on really including bilingual learners and multilingual ideas into our sessions. So I think it would've been really difficult for product partners to realize this on their own if they hadn't involved kids through co-design.

[00:20:53] Alex Sarlin: 100%, and that example really makes it come very alive. You can see how different types of ideas, different types of learning mechanisms can just sprout in such a playful and fun and exciting way and change how designers think about their whole product. Maeda, you've done a ton of this work. I'm so curious.

You've done so much research with the Sandbox Initiative. You've been building it for a while. What are some of the most surprising insights that you've gotten when you work with some of these students, when you bring in new voices, bringing in bilingual voices, bringing in educator plus student plus developer voices?

What stands out to you? 

[00:21:26] Medha Tare: Yeah One of the themes I think that's coming out is that less is more, particularly when it comes to AI. Not all kids want a tutor that is ever present or too chatty or interrupting the learning process and their flow. And of course, we're still learning how any of that kind of interaction can impact learning long term.

And so I think it's really interesting to see the variation amongst kids and how they want those sorts of supports to show up in products, and it's something that we're tracking definitely over the many different partnerships that we have. Another one is designing different kinds of reading buddies.

They don't want something that's, like, too bossy or didactic, right? We were co-designing with another partner, and we had fifth graders, and again, they were bilingual kids and boys, and they were talking about what they wanted their reading buddies to look like. And each of the kids was designing their own buddy separately, and what they each drew was the other one, their best friend.

Which was so sweet. So it really just shows, like, they want somebody they feel comfortable reading to, and a lot of products have a read aloud function where the child is supposed to read aloud so that, again, we can gather data on how they're doing and where they're having challenges and things like that.

So I think the social emotional part, as Liza said, is really critical. Like, you want kids to feel comfortable using and sharing and speaking if you want the product to work the way it's supposed to in theory, right? 

[00:22:53] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. A few things stand out from what I'm hearing you both say that are so interesting.

Where you mentioned how students want to learn, and with the social emotional piece, and, like, how the product feels to them, and how the personalities of the product basically, or the personalities of a reading buddy or a tutor feel to them. One of the big bugaboos for me with a lot of the frontier models is that they're very didactic.

You ask a simple question, it'll feed you paragraphs and paragraphs about it. It just jumps right into teacher mode, and it feels like that's a really powerful insight to say students want it to feel friendly. They want it to feel, to not get in their way or break their flow. Those are things that I think you can't even recognize when you're designing in a vacuum.

And when you see it in front of a student, you go, "Oh." So Michael made a, evoked AI here a little bit, and obviously this is, like, the theme of the multiple years at this point. Everybody is struggling and sometimes struggling in a good way, sometimes struggling in a negative way to try to figure out what AI should look like in learning that will be engaging, meaningful, effective.

As AI-powered tools become everywhere in edtech, both with established players and, and new players, what are some of the main findings that you've gotten from engaging young people and pedagogical experts in conversations about AI? What might our audience want to know about AI usage in tools that they might not already be thinking about coming from your co-design process?

[00:24:15] Michael Preston: So I guess I'll start at a high level, but defer to my colleagues here who will have more fine-grained or nuanced responses here as well. But one thing to recognize, I think, is that we're in this, this tech lash moment that's arrived on edtech's shores, right? That from families' thoughts and k- even children's thoughts about the technology that's kind of pervasive in learning and unavoidable.

There's also this sort of broader societal shift, and I think we're starting to see evidence of schools and districts also kind of pulling back on their investments or on the prevalence of tech writ large. I think there's a risk of it being A too broad a brush, right? And, and we- we've always been proponents of very thoughtfully designed and thoughtfully used technology, but that's not what we're talking about here necessarily.

So AI is arriving at a moment of resistance, I think, which is kind of interesting. And even talking to kids, kids are f- find it suspect that kids are already found themselves burned by everyday tech like social media, of course. A lot's been written about that, for better or for worse. But the fact is, AI is already here.

We've been seeing it in the sandbox project flow for years now, and only recently, I think, has it become really more in the forefront of consciousness, which is, it's important. And this is used to do kind of administrative or s- you know, back-end work, but it's also now becoming more of a front-end ex- experience for kids.

And so I think it's just important to note the shift is happening. But kids are kind of attuned to this. They're-- I wouldn't say there's like a resistance movement nec- necessarily, or maybe it's forming, but this idea that kids don't necessarily accept the inevitability of technologies that are designed for them but maybe aren't beneficial to them in some way.

So, so we're at this interesting critic- rise of critical thinking around tech while schools and districts and families are all kind of trying to figure out, like, the way forward, which at the moment feels somewhat binary. It's like, let's pull it all back rather than be careful and, you know, let the evidence guide us about where it can be purposeful and having a good impact and not disrupting things that kids really care about in their lives, like the relational dynamics of being together in schools and the connection that they make with an educator that is, we know, is so vital to kids' actual learning.

So I think it's in that we hear a lot from the kids that we hear. There's also this other side of your question that I think is really interesting, and Ben, your colleague Ben, highlighted in a recent interview this oncoming tidal wave of AI-generated apps that anybody can make. We're all creators now. So what would it mean to ha- unleash like all these new agentic things?

I think it's interesting. It could be really great. It could also be a disaster. It's probably gonna be a combination of those two things. So how-- In some ways it goes back to our, our methods, like the methodology of the practice of co-design, the tools that we support, multi-legged stool that Medha articulated at the beginning.

All these things still matter, or they matter even more as everybody starts making stuff. So I think it's still like if you can do it well, if you can design with care, bring in your audience, bring in the evidence base, you're gonna do better. But AI is this accelerant and com- complicating factor. 

[00:27:13] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I think one aspect of that opening up for apps coming in is that some of the apps that are coming in that aren't necessarily as concerned with pedagogical quality, they are gonna focus purely on engagement or focus even on giving students, you know, what they want, meaning ease of use, right?

Or like giving answers. Uh, you see a lot of the homework help apps in the App Store that basically make it very easy to get answers to offload your thinking, and that's not what we want at any age, but especially not at the younger ages. So it becomes more and more critical for the edtech community to understand what makes high-quality pedagogical tools engaging and exciting, because they have to compete with a flood of creator-created tools that are gonna be all, you know, just about the engagement.

So I wanna open this up a little further. Medha, what jumps out to you about this wave of AI tools, and what are you learning from the co-design process? 

[00:28:03] Medha Tare: Yeah. I think both from the co-design as well as our work, again, going to the learning sciences, it's really making sure that you're still designing based on how we know people learn, and that should be the core of every product, that you should be able to transparently share the connection between your activities and your outputs in your product to, again, research-based evidence of how people learn.

So we are always encouraging all of our partners to be more transparent with users on their websites about where that evidence is coming from. Obviously, there's not Research on every aspect of AI right now, right? So there will be some leaps that are taken between the evidence base and what's designed, but there should be strong connections between the two, and that's, I think, what we're looking to make sure that people are doing until we have more research on exactly what the long-term impacts are.

[00:28:54] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. There would definitely is not yet enough research, especially about the nuanced questions we all have about, you know, personalities of, of AI tutors or, or what environmental factors shape things, or the relational dynamics are so, so interesting to me. Liza, is there anything you wanna add to that? Is there anything that you've seen in the AI space that would be worth sharing to our audience about how we should be thinking about them?

[00:29:14] Liza Gak: Yeah. I think we're at such an inflection point of AI that for everyday people, everybody has such different experiences with AI, and we've seen this with doing sessions around AI with children and families, or just with children. Like, some parents use AI all day, every day, while others don't know what it is and have never used it.

Same with kids. I think that there's just such a diversity of experiences when it comes to thinking about AI, that we probably need to come together and think of common definition, and also think of ways that we can build some healthy criticality and questioning of the things that AI provides us with.

So teaching kids how to question what AI tells them, different ways to prompt AI. I think there's an opportunity here to be really creative, but also really critical of how AI is playing a role in education, but also just everyday life for kids and families. 

[00:30:19] Medha Tare: I'm gonna plus one that. I think any product that uses AI that's kid-facing should have AI literacy built into it so that kids know that they're interacting with an AI, when they're interacting with an AI, and that they, again, are building those critical thinking skills at the same time.

[00:30:34] Alex Sarlin: 100%. I mean, the analogy that always comes to mind for me is the first few years of online learning, of internet-enabled learning, and people just, as you said, some families were using it all day, every day, right from day one, and some that had never accessed it and had no access to it, did not want or were afraid of it, which they are also some people afraid of AI, and it creates this incredibly diverse spectrum of experiences as people come in, and you need some sort of evening orientation and to make sense of it.

And also, I think we all have to be humble about what we know and we don't know yet, where the research is still coming out. We have to figure out what the best way to use AI for learning is. There's a million flowers blooming right now, and we gotta figure out what actually works. I'm sure you're in a really amazing position to look at that.

So this is a question for all of you. Let's do a round robin. Let me start with you, uh, Medha. So for educators, for edtech founders, for technology leaders, operators who are listening to this podcast who say, "You know, I would love to make sure that children and pedagogy experts are core to the process early in the process, that we don't realize later that we made a mistake in motivation or that we, we missed some amazing idea about gardening, you know, about the garden that children might have come up with," how would you recommend that they ensure that children's voices especially remain at the center of their design process?

What should they do? 

[00:31:53] Medha Tare: Well, conveniently we have a new toolkit, so go to codesignwithkids.org and it really offers a lot of really great videos, again with experts, but shared in a very accessible way of how to get started, how to shift your mindset from user testing to ideation with kids and youth. And of course, we're happy to work with folks, uh, as well to bring these ideas to life.

But I think just watching some of the videos, you also get a sense of what the space is like, what the room is like with how generative those sessions are. And I think that will help people shift their mindset towards the immediate feedback loop, which is typically what people are looking for. Which again, as Liza mentioned, is also very important.

But the mindset shift I think is the biggest change that we are seeing in our partners where they will say things like, "Well, we wanted to know what families thought, but we didn't know that we could do it in this way." We were actually working with them and working and hearing parents' concerns, and having parents share their ideas with us of what a product could look like.

Like, we've never done that before. We always just build something and then- Right ... put it in front of them, right? And so it's really shifted the way a lot of folks are thinking about. And I think right now in this moment when parents have a lot of opinions, and rightfully so, about the amount of tech or the kinds of tech their kids are using, it's a good time to involve all of those different stakeholders as equal participants in the process.

[00:33:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I love that focus on a mindset shift of actually, you know, opening up the process a little bit and having brainstorming ideation, unearthing those, as you said, the unique insights that only children have much earlier in the process, and not just have feeling like you need a clickable prototype or like a product to put in front of people and say, "Do you know what, how to get to the next step?"

Like that's just, that could be too late. Michael, what about you? How would you recommend people think about having that mindset shift, right? Really getting into a place in their development where they can have co-design be central to the process. 

[00:33:46] Michael Preston: I think building from what Medha shared, you're trying to make this more of a formal practice and not casual.

And kudos to people who have actually have tried to bring in kids and their families and others even casually just to make sure that their voice is in the room. It's, it's not to impugn their work, it's to give it some formality and structure so they're getting the b- the biggest benefit from bringing them in, right?

It's a real investment and but there's also this rigorous methodology that our co-design toolkit, I think, articulates really well, but also in a way that's like playful and actionable and hopefully feels very inviting to folks, and they'll hopefully just join our community and find more of each other as well.

I guess one thing I've observed in some of our work is the companies that benefit the most from this also bring in lots of diverse people from the company in. It's not just like the design team or the UX team, or like the trust and safety team necessarily. All those are really important, but bringing in folks who can benefit from hearing, um, one of our, our edtech partners that we've worked with extensively likes to have engineers come in because the lead said he wants them to hear the kids and have the sort of real experience of the, their voices and what they have to say and what they're like as they do the work they do, so they feel more connected to the work And so I think we, we kind of have the, we have the practices, and there's, there's really no good reason not to use it at this point.

Sort of as a ch- a cheesy tagline, we've been saying like, "Build it right the first time." But like, ultimately if you, if you start way upstream when you're still making all the decisions, you have a lot more leverage. And so waiting to fix those challenges, the motivational challenges, the other design challenges, is like at your own risk.

Like it's gonna be harder and more expensive later, so do it sooner. 

[00:35:22] Medha Tare: We've heard partners say that exact thing though to us, which is that it saved them time and effort by doing this early on so they didn't go down the wrong path in their design work, right? So it definitely is an early investment in that way, and then a lot of folks have actually years' worth of development ideas generated from one series of sessions because They're very, very rich outputs.

And again, I'll, I'll give our, our partners at Giant Room a shout-out here because they are wonderful at doing a lot of this analysis work. And then partners have ideas that they can mine from as they're continuing their development work. So I think it's an early investment, and it is an investment in that way, but it yields a lot of output.

[00:36:02] Liza Gak: I think like Michael and Medha said, it's such an investment. Like, we've been talking about all the things that you need to make co-design successful: resources, facilitation, time, relationships, and I think it's scary for product teams to commit that much up front, especially because there might be this idea that kids won't know what's best for them, or they won't know what's right that goes into a product.

But we always say that kids are experts at being kids today, and adults might be experts at being engineers or designers or educators, but when we come together, I think that there's a lot of really interesting ideas that come out that wouldn't have otherwise. And I think that we've been collecting data with all of the teams, and all of the designers have come back and said, "This has not only shaped our product substantially but has changed how our team operates and how our team will design going forward."

So I think it's a really substantial change that does require a lot of hard work and investment, but it's really exciting to see the ripple effect of participating in something like Sandbox. Teams are now saying, "We're gonna include co-design from the beginning," or like, "These ideas that surfaced in co-design, they're gonna show up in other products that we're making, too."

So it's really exciting to see what co-design can accomplish. 

[00:37:33] Alex Sarlin: You mentioned some of those results, 90-plus percent of participants saying they're gonna use co-design, and they would recommend it, and they, it's meaningfully changed their product. It's really exciting. And just funny thought that strikes me as I hear you all talk about this, which is that, you know, there's lots of different technology sectors.

There's lots of different people designing for different types of end users, right? There are people making accounting software and legal software and software for civic engineers and all of that, and the product mindset is always trying to be keep your end users' motivation, what they care about in mind.

And I think one of the ironies of edtech is that people go into edtech 'cause they care about education, they care about kids, they care about learners, but once you're inside an edtech company and there's all these constraints, not enough relationships, not enough time- It feels like the first thing to jettison is the users, is the kids, right?

It's like the, wait, we have to do our product roadmap, we have to develop, we have to get our engineering tickets up, and suddenly it's like the focus starts to fade into the background. And what I love about the work you all do is you bring it right back in. And I mean, I think most people in edtech would rather talk to-- They would get so much hearing from kids, those engineers that are in the sessions, I bet they remember what those fifth graders say for six months and they're like, "Remember that, that kid who said that thing?

Uh, that's a..." And that's so beautiful, and I'd rather spend time with third graders than accountants or lawyers or civic engineers, and I think most people at edtech would, yet We don't always make time for it. We don't always actually find the methodology to make it happen. So it's really inspiring to hear.

So last question for this team, because you are so close to the research, you're so close to pedagogy and policy, I'd love to hear how you think about what is coming next in the edtech landscape. We talked a little bit about techlash, we talked a little bit about how co-design is rising as a philosophy, but what else are you seeing as you look ahead into the edtech landscape?

[00:39:20] Medha Tare: I'll follow up, and maybe related to the techlash idea, but I think techlash may be, uh, the more extreme way to describe it. But I think just examining edtech with a more critical eye is something we all should be doing, and I think that is-- if that's the upshot without it being like throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of thing, right, then that's not a bad thing.

That's not a bad trend. We should all be thinking about how kids and educators are spending their time in the classroom, what are the learning and developmental goals of any activity that's happening in, in the, in the classroom, whether on a screen or not on a screen. And so I think that's hopefully a good trend that we can, you know, also support people's thinking around the nuances of what that means.

[00:40:02] Alex Sarlin: And we're seeing some manifestations of that in frameworks coming out, in organizations starting to say, "Okay, how do we make sure this develops the right way and doesn't follow down the sort of negative impact path of social media or of previous trends?" Michael, what would you say to that? 

[00:40:16] Michael Preston: Yeah, I'd build from that very statement, Alex, that we're starting to see, like in the AI space, which we know is driving so much of the conversation these days, that we're starting with safety floors, that there's a lot of AI developers I think are looking for guidance on this for kids for sure.

There's the EU AI Act's take, there's UNICEF's wonderful guidance on AI and children's rights. Even though children's rights aren't necessarily the framing of the US market, it's still a very good benchmark when we take seriously. Common Sense Media just started a new youth AI safety institute, and so these are all necessary, I think, to kind of establish that safety floor.

But what excites me is once that's been sort of shored up, what do we do that's really beneficial and positive and really inspires kids and gives them something? Like, I'm always looking for-- We talk a lot about what AI displaces for kids, you know. Does it reduce their learning? Or does it, like, take away cognitive function 'cause it's so easy?

Or does it, does it interrupt relationship with other humans? Like, how can we actually not just assume that, but actually design productively for the actual human goals we have for kids and not feel held back? So I'm looking forward to that shift. 

[00:41:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I know that the Joan Ganz Cooney Center has also done a lot of really great research about kids using technology with parents or kids using technology with others.

I think that's also a piece of the AI landscape we have not even really begun to explore yet. What are all the positive things that could happen? How do you have relational dynamics between people with an AI component as part of that? It's a very exciting space, and I agree with all that. So yeah, AI Act, the UNICEF guidance, Common Sense Media, people are really trying to, as you say, shore up the floor, make sure that we don't fall through the bottom, and then once we do, we can think about the, you know, going to the stars.

And our last question, what is a resource you would recommend for somebody who wants to dive deeper into any of the topics we discussed today? There's all sorts of amazing people commenting and, and writing about this. Where would you recommend we start? 

[00:42:06] Medha Tare: I've had a few recent conversations with Malia Onufer at CedaEd, and she and her team are putting out really fantastic open source resources on a lot of the topics we've talked about today.

Learning sciences, how it can be embedded in product design or curriculum, ad-advanced R&D for edtech, and I know her organization does a lot of the work with companies who are now doing efficacy research, which is so critical and critically needed. And then also, like, edtech readiness levels, things like that.

So they're putting out a lot of open source resources for other folks to explore and learn from and use in this space. So we, we appreciate them. 

[00:42:43] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. Yeah. A fixture of ASU+GSV, somebody who is always sharing really amazing work in the space and sort of slightly below the radar at times, but shouldn't be because incredibly important work.

[00:42:55] Michael Preston: I mentioned at the beginning of the call that I'd listened to Ben Cornell's interview last week, I think, and he mentions at one point in the end where he just lists off, like, a litany of great opportunities that AI make it easier to accelerate or automate so that kids can benefit. But this idea that of the, the sort of legacy of work that Edmund Gordon, you know, now more than 100 years old, brought us around assessment in service of learning, and this idea that AI could perhaps operationalize that for kids at an individual level.

His work with Eric Tucker is really super inspiring. And so we should be looking for these well-established research bases from which to build tools that actually can make that accessible and, and scalable in, in unique ways. So that kind of idea, I think is really interesting. 

[00:43:38] Alex Sarlin: 100%. I'm not a... You're all PhDs.

I think, Michael, we first met at Teachers College in Instructional Design, and I'm not as advanced as any of you in it, but even I know that there are so many things that we know about learning that we've never been able to implement at scale in technology, and that we maybe could do now. It is really, really exciting.

[00:43:55] Liza Gak: I was gonna make one last plug for the co-design toolkit. I think that if you're interested in, like, how co-design actually works, there's videos, there's explanations of techniques, and lots of case studies of how co-design has actually worked. And I think if you go to codesignwithkids.org, you can find a lot of different ways that co-design has been successful and how you might be able to implement it.

[00:44:21] Michael Preston: Do you have a favorite technique that you want everyone to know? 

[00:44:24] Liza Gak: There's this one called Mission from Mars, where an adult dresses up as a Martian and asks kids to, like-- They're like, "I've just come down to Earth, and you need to explain XYZ issue to me." So kids have a lot of fun, like, preparing presentations for the Martian, and it really helps them spell out things that they never would've thought to articulate.

Like, "Tell me about an average school day," and then they'll present to the Martian. And I haven't gotten to be a Martian yet, but hopefully will be the next line on my CV. 

[00:45:00] Michael Preston: Maybe when we get to Mars, we'll be able to try it out. 

[00:45:03] Liza Gak: Yeah, with the help of AI. 

[00:45:06] Medha Tare: And that's one of those techniques that was first published at the Interaction Design in Children conference.

In fact, one of the authors was at the conference that we were at last week, so she mentioned Mission from Mars. So the work of the toolkit is really to bring a lot of this work that's happened in academic spheres out to more people in a more accessible way. 

[00:45:24] Alex Sarlin: Yes. Everybody should be checking out the toolkit that is the impetus for this conversation today.

It is so amazing that you all put in the work to create a toolkit so that everybody can start using some of these techniques and creating participatory co-design sessions within their edtech workflows. It's really exciting. Michael Preston, PhD, is the executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Medha Tare is the senior director of research at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, and Liza Gak is a post-doctoral fellow.

They are all part of the toolkit, the Cooney Center's co-design toolkit. Thank you all so much for being here with us on Edtech Insiders. 

[00:46:00] Michael Preston: Thanks, Alex. So good to be here. 

[00:46:02] Medha Tare: Thank you so much for having us. 

[00:46:04] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the edtech community.

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This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Cooley LLP. Cooley is the go-to law firm for education and edtech innovators, offering industry-informed counsel across the pre-K to gray spectrum. With a multidisciplinary approach and a powerful edtech ecosystem, Cooley helps shape the future of education