Hi Al!

Thank you for your questions and comments! The apps are available to the public for free here:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/first-8-stud...

Here’s a bit more about the research and the significant gains, but the full research report will be coming out closer to mid-summer: https://www.sree.org/conferences/2015s/program/...

And a note about the traditional methods — by that we mean the non-technology-infused preschool curriculum.

Additional information, the full curriculum, and more specifics about the subitizing and equipartitioning content can be found at: http://first8studios.org

Thanks again for your interest and questions; I’d love to chat more! Please let us know your thoughts on the games, curriculum, and report (as currently only shared in the above abstract)!
Jillian

Hi Lisa – for the purpose of our research study all PD was in-person for a full day. The PD oriented teachers to the content itself, common misconceptions children have about the content, and how to support children’s learning. The second part of the PD involved teachers playing the games themselves and intentionally making errors so that they could see the scaffolding mechanism within the game. We discussed ways to support the gameplay. The third part was orienting them to the many non-digital classroom activities that are integrated into regular preschool structures such as circle time, center time, snack time, and outdoor play. The final part oriented them to the technology – we used 4 iPads for each classroom that teachers set up in an open play center that children visited for about 10-15 minutes at a time – that’s the amount of time we anticipated they would play and our study found that they naturally moved onto other activities after that period of time.

Teachers seemed to like the PD and we’re working on ways to provide virtual PD right now in the form of videos and online materials.
Best wishes,
Ashley

Hi Lisa!
Yes, and to add onto what Ashley mentioned, in our digital teacher’s guide, we provided Professional Development modules that the teachers could use throughout the implementation as well — these consisted of self evaluations, videos, stepped out modules, questions for reflection, and a self assessment. This was not required for the teachers in our study, but offered as additional support.
Here is a link to just a few of the videos that were provided in the PD section of the digital teacher’s guide: http://nextgenmath.org/2013/08/22/can-video-bas...
Here is a link to one of our partner teachers sharing some of her thoughts on teh program: http://nextgenmath.org/2015/04/10/it-has-helped...
Next month, the digital PD and videos will be provided on the http://first8studios.org website, but we’re still finalizing that for the public release!
Thanks again!
Jillian

Hi Elizabeth,

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the inclusion of 1 collaborative game in each unit made a big difference and we’d love to design future games to address additional social/emotional learning goals, such as persistence and flexible problem solving. For the collaborative games – meaning 1 iPad with 2 kids touching the screen at the same time – we found this was successful, but only if the teacher set it up so that they only had access to that 1 iPad and taught them how to collaborate in an explicit way. You can see on Treasure bubbles there are two characters and each child is suppose to control one character. A challenge was that they could play alone if they wanted to.

Teachers were involved in multiple ways – some were testing materials with the development team, some were part of the pilot study (n=3) or RCT (n=16), and the rest were involved in focus groups during the development and revision process. There are several videos on our blog that show interviews with teachers that show what they think (http://nextgenmath.org/).

Unfortunately, we didn’t have resources to work with parents, but that is an area we’ve identified for future work, especially now that the apps are available to everyone now. We’d want to develop parent materials with as much feedback from parents as we had for the development of the teacher materials.

Jillian’s like to the SREE presentation above should help answer your questions about the research, but feel free to contact me directly for more information on that (and the assessment we developed) at alewis@edc.org.

Best wishes,
Ashley

Yes, thank you, Elizabeth! At some point, I would love to have a full documentary made to share how integral every teacher was to the development of the apps, teacher’s guide, and curriculum. :)
Here are a few videos from just one of our regular partner sites for development:
http://nextgenmath.org/2012/08/23/little-sprout...
During the first two years, the development team was in the classroom between 2 – 4 times a month. This includes having our designers, developers, and editorial team sit in and learn from the teachers and children.
Here’s a video of one of our partner teacher’s reactions: http://nextgenmath.org/2015/04/10/it-has-helped...
We’re still constantly learning from our teachers and now since our materials are available to the public, we’re hearing from even more teachers!!
Thanks again for your interest and feedback!!
Jillian

Hi Joanne,

I’m sure Phil will have more to say, but yes the subitizing unit is based on the learning trajectories work by Clements and Sarama. The equipartitioning is based on the learning trajectories work of Jere Confrey.
Best wishes,
Ashley

Hi Avron,
The collaboration between the research and development teams was great, but I think the key was having the learning blueprint from which to ground the development process. I think what’s unique about our project is how much the research impacted the development and really making sure that the balance between fun (because they won’t learn if they aren’t motivated enough to play) and learning was achieved.

Two games from each unit (total of 4) tracked the students play and reported that back to the teacher within the digital teachers guide. This allowed a teacher to look at each child’s gameplay and have a good sense of which skills they had mastered in the game and those they were struggling with, so they could focus on those during non-digital activities or explicitly direct children to play certain games. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to keep the tracking feature in the public release, but that’s an area for future work here!
Best wishes,
Ashley

Jeremy,
Yes, we definitely used a curricular activity system approach here—-meaning that technology was not designed to be stand-alone, but was integrated into coherent sequences of instructional activities, and these sequences were designed in accordance with the needs and constraints of public preschool programs.

For example, we used non-digital activities—such as whole-class book reading and small-group hands-on activities—in addition to the digital materials. Also the digital and non-digital materials were designed to address preschool math content standards and to employ common preschool activity structures, such as whole-class discussions during circle time and small-group work during center time. As another example, teachers were provided professional development (PD) that integrated pedagogy, content knowledge, technology training, and materials use so that they could use the materials effectively.

We think that this systems approach is important, since decades of research has shown that simply “air dropping” technology into classrooms is ineffective.

Hi Kathy,

Thanks, its been a great project! We’d love to conduct a longitudinal study and our team was just discussing that yesterday! Its on our list of future projects :-)

Best wishes,
Ashley