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2024 Conference Catch Up

This summer, a few FableVisionaries are headed to conferences! We’ll be taking in the sun, attending amazing panels, meeting with partners, and hopefully seeing you! Read up on where we’re headed, and make sure to check out the conferences too! 

 
 

Games For Change

We’re headed to G4C! This year’s festival theme is The 2030 Marker: A Catalyst for Global Change, showcasing games and XR's capacity for innovation, creativity, and social impact leadership related to sustainability. Director of G.L.A.M. Innovation Kellian Adams Pletcher, President Gary Goldberger, and Vice President of audiyo-yo Anne Richards will be attending! The event’s schedule and details can be found here.

When: June 27-28

Where: New York City

Play Make Learn

The Play Make Learn conference aims to engage attendees in learning science ideas and experiences; communicate design, education, and research; demonstrate new and upcoming games and technology; and network to spark new innovative projects. Click here for more conference information.

When: July 19-18

Where: Madison, WI

Serious Play

Learn more about play as a tool in innovating education, training, and knowledge mobilization. Director of G.L.A.M. Innovation Kellian Adams Pletcher, President Gary Goldberger, and Executive Producer Peter Stidwill are attending! More event details can be found here!

When: August 12-14

Where: Toronto, ON

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FableVision & Partners Celebrate Nods from 2024 EdTech Award

EdTech Digest’s EdTech Awards recognize projects that transform the face of educational technology in innovative ways. Their competitive recognition program spotlights ‘cool tools’ that are enriching the lives of learners in the K-12, Higher Education, and Skills and Workforce sectors. FableVision is excited to share our collaborations that received praise!

Nunaka Strikes Gold!

 
 

We are thrilled to announce that Nunaka: My Village has been awarded gold for Best New Product or Service at this year’s EdTech Awards! Additionally, Nunaka is a finalist in the Social Studies Solution Category. Developed in partnership with Chugachmiut, an Alaskan Native Tribal consortium, the mobile app enables students aged 3-5 to explore Sugpiaq heritage, the Sugt’stun language, and key school readiness goals. Read more about the game here and here. 

Since the game’s release, Nunaka has been awarded the 2023 GEE! Learning Game Award in the Formal Learning Elementary category and a gold Serious Play Award in the Professional Digital Entries (Preschool Education) category. We’re immensely proud of our Nunaka team for their exceptional work on such an impactful game and deeply appreciate the recognition it has garnered.

FableVision’s Fantastic Finalists

A few other of FableVision’s projects are EdTech finalists! Congratulations to our partners!

 

Finalist: Professional Development Learning Solution

Start It Up! is a collaboration with Georgia Public Broadcasting and the Georgia Council on Economic Education. The online business simulator was made for high school students, college students, and small business owners to play through the process of creating and running a startup company. 

 

Finalist: New Product or Service

GASHA GO! World, is another collaboration with Georgia Public Broadcasting and the Georgia Department of Education! GASHA GO! World transports users to the universe inside arcade machines, with a variety of games, animated songs, and activities focused on developing computer science learning for K-2 students. 

 

Finalist: Higher Education Solution

The interactive Forest Quest was made in collaboration with Project Learning Tree Canada and serves as an online learning experience for 18-25-year-olds to learn the fundamentals of wildlife biology, forests’ impact on human life, biodiversity, and the needs and rights of Indigenous people. 

 

Finalist: STEM Solution

My S.T.E.M. Adventure is made in collaboration with the STEMIE center at UNC-Chapel Hill and Bridge Multimedia! The interactive’s adventure-packed activities are paired with a born-accessible design to enhance STEM engagement opportunities for 0-5-year-old children. Kids and caregivers play collaboratively, take photos of their IRL learning, and create a customizable storybook of their achievements! 

 
 

If you’re interested in learning more about our award winners, or any of our other projects, reach out to us at info@fablevision.com, we’d love to hear from you!

 

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PAX East 2024: A FableVision Studios Recap

FableVision was back at PAX this March!

“Unlocking the Positive Potential of Gaming for Kids and Teens” panelists present at PAX East 2024

As an Associate Producer at the studio, I got the chance to speak on a panel called “Unlocking the Positive Potential of Gaming for Kids and Teens,” organized and moderated by Sam Schwamm, a Research Manager at the Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab. The other panelists included:

  • David Bickham, PhD, the Research Director at the Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab

  • Jason Kahn, PhD, Chief Science Officer and Head of Product at Mightier, a studio that creates games for emotional health and regulation

  • Chris James, Audio Data Specialist at Modulate, a company that makes content-moderation software for online chats

Our panel’s goal was to educate parents, educators, caregivers, and game designers about the potential pitfalls of online spaces for young people, and (more importantly!) how gaming and interactive play can be an amazing tool for learning, problem-solving, perseverance, and self-expression.

Jason said something towards the beginning of the panel that I’m still thinking about: when you’re a kid, you can often feel pretty powerless – you have no control over your bedtime, or going to school, or what you’re having for dinner. Games, then, are an opportunity to flex those decision-making skills however you want within a world that’s built for you to explore. 

I’ve personally been inspired by how games, especially those with avatar creators, are also a place for experimentation with self-expression. Want to run around as a battle-scarred warrior with huge biceps and hot-pink lipstick? Sure! World’s your oyster.

From an educational perspective, games represent a scaffolded space for exploration and trial-and-error learning. Games have a unique ability to algorithmically adjust their difficulty levels based on how a player is managing a certain topic, tailoring a learning experience that meets a child where their skills are. A lot of the projects I work on at FableVision have this sort of leveling-responsive play that helps kids learn by letting them fail and come back to a topic once they feel they’ve gotten the hang of it.

Our design process at FableVision also includes consulting educators and kids a lot. The best people to tell you if your approach is resonating with kids…is kids. Getting students involved in testing throughout the development process helps us learn what’s working and what’s not, and on the panel, I encouraged people who are designing games for kids to test with them as much as they could!

When it comes to improving games and online spaces for young people, improving diversity in games is super important – both in character representations onscreen, but also in the people behind the screens who are responsible for creating safe online communities. Creating communities that support players – no matter their background – is key to getting people from diverse backgrounds involved in creating games, which in turn adds more perspectives and stories to the medium (and so the positive cycle continues).

I was really excited that I got to speak on this panel and share some of the work that FableVision does. Thank you so much for inviting me, Sam, and thank you so much PAX for having me!

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Our Creative Director's Top 10.5 Favorite Moments from the "GASHA GO! World" App Development

The launch of the GASHA GO! World app got me thinking about its origins and took me back to a document from May 10, 2017, with the header: 

GPB K-3 Project
Animation Song: A Nonsensical Musical Number About Number Sense

On the heels of producing several amazing projects together, we had just kicked off a new GPB “K-3 Math Project” with Andrew and Laura at FableVision’s Fort Point Channel studio. During the day-long “FabLab,” a creative brainstorming and production planning meeting with our teams, we came up with a game concept involving a Japanese-inspired “Gashapon” machine filled with round plastic capsules with mini toys inside (for reference, these are the ones at every supermarket that fills parents with dread and children with hope, relying on fate to grant them the one giant, swirly colored rubber hi-bounce ball in a sea of small, drab, monocolored ones. A mortgage payment in quarters later, sometimes fate delivered). 

At that point, we hadn’t totally nailed down the characters, story, and world that would eventually become GASHA GO! But we knew, as Gary Goldberger, FableVision’s President and my partner in creative crimes, is fond of saying, there was “a THERE, there.” The “Numbers are Everywhere” number sense video and the “Bubble Build” subitizing game were the first entries into the GASHA GO! universeIt was clear on the first day that we shared similar goals and ideologies around what making high-quality educational media entails, and that we had a lot of fun together doing it.

After more than six years and a half-dozen projects (and counting!) together, including the brand-new GASHA GO! World app that was a year in the making,  that partnership, and our commitment to serving children and educators in innovative and lasting ways, is stronger than ever. We are all so proud of this project and the ideals that the GASHA GO! World App and its team of creators embody: hard work, collaboration, communication, respect, kindness, inclusivity, and being brave enough to do something that hasn’t been done before. 

To celebrate the launch of this first-of-its-kind, early childhood computer science app (here’s some of our team at GPB’s “Be My Neighbor Day” in Atlanta, where GASHA GO! World had a booth and a giant, fuzzy, walkaround Pow!)  here’s some insight into the making of GASHA GO! World. As part of the OG GASHA GO! crew and the Creative Director, scriptwriter, and song lyricist for the new app, I’m excited to share a look behind the scenes, presented in the form of a top 10-ish list because that’s how Gen X’ers like myself roll. 

Leigh’s Top 10 and a Half Favorite Moments from the GASHA GO! World App Development 

One: Project Kickoff. We had an amazing time in Georgia meeting with the GPB team and educators. There was so much experience, knowledge, creativity, and passion in that room, and everyone was deeply committed to making something innovative, impactful, and FUN. We were able to leave with a project roadmap and the energy and momentum to start developing right away. 

Credit: Atlanta Magazine

Culinary champion: my first ever shrimp and grits

Libation low: “Moroccan Sunrise” 

Both deserve their own blog post, stay tuned. 

Two: The Upside Down. Speaking of roadmaps, I could have used one; I got lost in the GPB office for almost 30 minutes trying to subtly procure an iced coffee and couldn’t remember which floor the TV studio was on (this was on day two, mind you). To quote a very bemused Laura, “Didn’t the lack of a single window give it away?” 

Three: Swag. It was like every holiday rolled into one the day two GIANT cardboard boxes filled with Gashling plushies from GPB arrived in the FableVision office. We lost our collective minds holding these characters we’d come to love over many years in our hands. 

That’s another thing GPB gets: for young kids (and adult professionals, clearly) pairing high-quality digital tools with something tangible, like a toy or a book, not only reinforces educational goals, but enhances creativity, imagination, self-expression, and connection with the GASHA GO! World. 

Four: That’s So Meta. Gary, in a true example of “art imitating life,” was so inspired by the Gashling plushies that he built, from scratch, a life-size GASHA GO! claw machine for the studio to put them in that is not a distraction at all. 

Five (and a half) (this one is super long, plus fractions are mathy): Play Testing and Co-Design. GASHA GO! World is one of FableVision’s most extensively playtested products, and having the time, resources, and people to undertake this important process is truly a gift. At every stage, we were able to put the games and videos into Georgia K-2 classrooms with the actual teachers and students we were designing for. We gathered the educators’ feedback and observed the kids playing to make sure we were meeting our goals: 

  • Did the students understand how to play the game and want to keep playing? 

  • Were the language, reading level, and content developmentally appropriate?

  • Were the curriculum and pedagogy accurately represented? Our teachers were experts at presenting CS concepts and skills in ways that young children could understand, and we had to translate that into our games. 

  • Did we engage multiple kinds of learners and player types, and provide enough variety of scaffolding and feedback?

  • Were there opportunities for trial and error (“freedom to fail”), and motivation to keep going? 

  • Were the songs in the animated videos “catchy” and memorable? 

  • Did the Gashling characters consistently model the actions and values we want kids to embrace–like kindness, collaboration, curiosity, and grit—in ways that students could articulate? 

  • And most importantly, was it useful for teachers and would they be excited to use it in their classroom? 

The “magical” part of play testing and iterative development is that the participants get to see how their opinions and ideas get included in the final designs. In fact, the original five Gashlings (Zoom, Deejo, Pow, Tuft, and Bazzle), were named by Georgia students. One of the most effective ways to get kids engaged in STEM is to build their confidence and create a sense of belonging. What could be more empowering for our K-2 audience than actively doing the very things we want them to learn about, like the design process, communication, creativity, and collaboration, and seeing their ideas brought to life in the GASHA GO! World app? 

Six: Teachers are Everything: On a personal note, as the team’s resident lyricist, a HUGE shout-out to our GPB teachers for being some of the most positive and encouraging human beings I have ever met. Every time we would send over a new song and animation they gave us such joyful feedback that I would practically wait by my laptop for the Basecamp ping, and go back and reread it when I needed a self-esteem boost. 

Bungle with a snack

Seven: Team Bungle. “Bungle” is a new Gashling in the world of GASHA GO! He doesn’t have a ton of screen time, but when he is there, he leaves a lasting impression (you can see him in peak Bungle mode in the video about not oversharing and keeping information private). The FableVision team’s immediate reaction to this character–including naming him, suggestions for starring in a spin-off television show, and turning his name into an adjective and a verb–is just one example of what makes being part of a long-term project team so delightful. 

Eight: The Eras Tour, Kinda. We all work on multiple projects of varying sizes and production windows simultaneously, and the chance to work on such a robust app for a sustained time period with many of the same team members is a rare treat. We develop rhythms, a shared language, and inside jokes; a collective sense of responsibility and pride in the work; and the ability to sense when a morale boost or shot of inspiration is needed. 

Nine: The Final Countdown. That final sprint to the app stores is when the adrenaline really kicks in: bug fixes, copyediting, last-minute art tweaks, and testing new builds on multiple devices and platforms. It can be a stressful time for sure, but we are fortunate to have experience and a sense of camaraderie on our side, as well as the trust and support of our incredible partners at GPB and the Georgia DOE. We’re thrilled to share GASHA GO! World with the rest of the world. In the meantime, I will leave you with some sage advice from Bungle: Don’t comb food out of your mustache in a bathrobe at a job interview…wait until you get hired!

Ten: This FableFamily. We celebrated the app’s launch a few weeks ago with speeches, slideshows, and trivia (which was surprisingly ruthless given an entire category involved cats, but DM me if you want to know what team triumphed). Naturally, it was a company-wide event–full-time staff and our rockstar freelancers–because a project like this involves every single person, whether or not they were technically on the development team. 

We depend on each other to bounce around ideas, ask questions, take a stretch break, get coffee, get another viewpoint, vent frustrations, and celebrate small wins. That’s the FableVision ethos that has been cultivated over almost 30 years, and the one that will help us keep telling these “stories that matter” for the next 30…and beyond. 

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