LSX Projects: Videos & Prototypes

At Avonworth Primary Center, families who moved to the school mid-year expressed a desire to connect with other Avonworth families in their new neighborhoods. To meet this need, principal Scott Miller and the team of fellows developed a program called the Avonworth BRIDGE Builders—Building Relationships, Inspiring Dialogue, Growing Education—connecting families who transition mid-year to family representatives from each of Avonworth’s five neighborhoods. When new families arrive at Avonworth, they will receive a flyer with the contact information of their local family representatives, along with suggestions about the type of support they can provide.

At Duquesne Elementary School, parents and caregivers sought support for a wide range of needs, such as housing, transportation, and child care. In response, principal Erica Slobodnik and the team of fellows designed an interactive map of community resources, which they translated to Spanish, Arabic, and Pashto, the most commonly spoken languages by English learners at the school. The map includes a QR code, which families can scan to easily access the community resource links, phone numbers, and directions.

At Lockley Elementary School, parents and caregivers expressed a need for more centralized communication, and a website that was easy to navigate on mobile devices. In response, assistant superintendent Marino and the team of fellows designed a mobile-friendly website and an accompanying flyer embedded with a QR code, which parents can scan to quickly access the website. The flyer will go back and forth with students each day in their red take-home folders, and the website will be regularly updated with the resources that families need to be partners in their children’s learning.

For families with elementary school children, life can feel hectic. And for educators managing classrooms of dozens of young students, the same feeling can apply. With so many expectations and so much to communicate on both sides, it isn’t always easy to build relationships, let alone create the sense that schools and parents are working in partnership to help young students learn.

This challenge was met head-on this year by the latest cohort of the Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX), a fellowship and problem-solving platform in New America’s Education Policy Program. Over the past school year, seven LSX Fellows—three school leaders, one learning scientist, one social entrepreneur, one journalist, and one children’s book author—have been building collaborative projects designed to deepen family engagement.

Over the course of one school year, the LSX Focus Fellows—three school leaders, a learning scientist, a social entrepreneur, a journalist, and a community consultant/children’s book author—designed tools to deepen family engagement at three elementary schools in soutwestern Pennsylvania. Their projects, created with and for families and educators in each school, are examples of low-cost ways to build trust and lasting relationships between parents, caregivers, school leaders, and teachers. In the video below, you'll hear about the inspiration and process behind their innovations, which you can explore further in our blog post and policy brief.

Read about and see the video story of how and why 5 LSX fellows from multiple countries zoomed in on the importance of building belonging in middle school students—and helping teachers learn how they can help.

Watch short videos and tap into lesson plans that support teachers, provide resources for their classrooms, and help them gain understanding of the science of belonging.

The Building Belonging Project’s vision is for every child to feel known, valued, and that they belong in school.

Read about and see a video story of how 5 LSX fellows from multiple countries created a music video, card kit, and campaign about the power of joy for learning, aiming to support families with young children and all caregivers.

A suite of activity cards to inspire joyful connections between children, their caregivers, and their communities. Grounded in research showing that joyful interactions support children's mental health, creativity, and engagement, the activity cards offer prompts that encourage children to reflect on, seek, and create joy.

Learn how 5 LSX fellows from multiple countries came together to identify new ways to meet the needs of migrant children, using game design. The group hosted a co-design workshop in which children informed and gave feedback on all of the games, and reflected on their own experiences using the games in their classrooms. Their input, and their teachers' reflections on using the games, helped refine the final products and the supporting resources, which became the SuperDiverse Gamekit.

In SuperDiverse environments, students come ​from a wide array of cultural, linguistic, ​socioeconomic, national, and religious ​backgrounds. Embracing SuperDiversity means ​leveraging these differences to create an ​inclusive, dynamic, and enriching learning ​environment. This gamekit provides a free set of games and playful activities that build more ​inclusive, welcoming classroom communities, which will ​help children with migrant backgrounds find strength in ​their cultural identities and feel more connected in an ​actively respectful learning environment.

This video tells the story of a project developed by a group of fellows in the Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) to help advance children’s learning. The Playful Learning Challenge is a project with 10 free gamified activities for young children, using simple materials at home to build early math skills and confidence. Parents are encouraged to capture video of their children doing the games and post and share those videos on social media to encourage others to do the same. Video produced by Maev Partners, 2022.

The Playful Learning Challenge team developed a series of ten research-supported activities that strengthen young children's math skills. These engaging activities are designed for children between the ages of three- and six-years-old, and can be used by early educators in classrooms or at home by children and their caregivers.

This video tells the story of a project developed by a group of fellows in the Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) to help advance children’s learning. Kindergrams are short audio clips featuring children around the world speaking about friendship and culture, in their own words. Video produced by Maev Partners, 2022.

We can learn a lot from listening to kids’ perspectives. Kindergrams are short audio recordings submitted by children and their families from around the world. Kids share their thoughts about #globalcitizenship themes like friendship, kindness, traditions, and how we are alike and different. The project has been created by a group of Learning Sciences Exchange fellows (@LSXfellowship on Twitter), a partnership between New America and the Jacobs Foundation. We represent backgrounds in early childhood policy, media, research, and journalism, with a common goal of elevating children’s voices for all to hear.

To accompany their audio files, or Kindergrams, the team created a Classroom Guide for early and elementary educators. The guide includes standards from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAYEC), the Common Core, and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE).

This video tells the story of a project developed by a group of fellows in the Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) to help advance children’s learning. Tech Together is the name of a group of learning activities for kids that can be done with the functions and features already built into a smartphone, such as the stopwatch or the GPS maps. Video produced by Maev Partners, 2022.

This campaign encourages caregivers to use the apps that are pre-loaded into their smartphones, such as the camera, the calculator, and the map, to interact with their children and help them think more deeply about their world.

Catherine de Lange, Janna Pahnke, Megan McClelland, and Jill Shinderman were pondering the questions: What if there was an easy way to foster beneficial interactions between infants and their caregivers? And what if we came up with a solution that would fit into everyday life without the need for hours of training? Something that would be as simple as picking up a book. Their answer to these burning questions was to create the book series Bunny to Bunny. Bunny to Bunny will specifically help to create important exchanges that will have lasting benefits for both children and their adults. They have carefully designed these books to promote interactions that create warm and secure bonds. Bunny to Bunny is a collaboration between a science journalist, a public policy expert, an early childhood scientist and a children’s writer, brought together by the Learning Sciences Exchange Fellowship

Research confirms that conversations between parents and children foster children’s brain processing, language and cognitive development. Sacha Kyle, Melissa Hogenboom, Meredith Rowe, and Elizabeth Shuey's project aims to promote high- quality conversational turn-taking among caregivers and young children so that all children have opportunities to thrive and build strong foundations for success at school and beyond. They’ve started by developing a Public Service Announcement and set of animations called Talk with Me!

Research confirms that conversations between parents and children foster children’s brain processing, language and cognitive development. Sacha Kyle, Melissa Hogenboom, Meredith Rowe, and Elizabeth Shuey's project aims to promote high- quality conversational turn-taking among caregivers and young children so that all children have opportunities to thrive and build strong foundations for success at school and beyond. They’ve started by developing a Public Service Announcement and set of animations called Talk with Me!

Disseminating research-based information about child development requires a multi-pronged and strategic communication approach. Research shows that naming characters in infants’ books promotes learning in the first year of life. Rob Carpenter, Lisa Scott, Sujata Gupta, and Katie Whitehouse created a public service announcement (PSA) to communicate to parents and caregivers to read early and often and to “Read the Right Books at the Right Time.” Their strategic approach incorporates expertise from scientific studies of infant development, communicating science through entertainment and journalism, and promoting policies that support families and children.

Disseminating research-based information about child development requires a multi-pronged and strategic communication approach. Research shows that naming characters in infants’ books promotes learning in the first year of life. Rob Carpenter, Lisa Scott, Sujata Gupta, and Katie Whitehouse created a public service announcement (PSA) to communicate to parents and caregivers to read early and often and to “Read the Right Books at the Right Time.” Their strategic approach incorporates expertise from scientific studies of infant development, communicating science through entertainment and journalism, and promoting policies that support families and children.