(By: Christine Muszynski)
Hello again from The CMC!
Today was yet another exciting day filled with many different sessions to attend. To start off the morning, my classmates and I attended a keynote presentation titled “Coming Together or Falling Apart?” The panel discussed the future of children’s media and content industries, in the age of digital transformation.
Shortly after this discussion, we all had the opportunity to break apart and attend sessions on our own. The first session I attended was called “Mini-Dragons: Kids as Commissioners”. The description of this session was as follows – “A live experiment (with REAL children) exploring whether kids could sit with commissioners to help decide future content for their peers”. After reading that there would be another group of children in this session, I immediately knew I had to attend. During this hour, Jon Hancock, Kate Pickering, Lindsay Taylor and Suzanne Smith all pitched different ideas to our “mini-dragons”. Each of these individuals presented their pitch ideas (which were across different media platforms) to the group of 4 children (2 boys and 2 girls), ranging from age 7-8.
After sitting through these 3 pitch ideas, this lively group of kids was very eager to share their thoughts and ideas on what they liked/disliked about what they just heard about. One little girl even made a comment about one of the speakers having a “voice that sounds like a butterfly!” This of course gave the audience and me a little chuckle.
These dragons then provided feedback about each 5 minute presentation. It never fails to amaze me how intelligent all of these children are. Overall, it is important to remember how valuable kids are, especially when they are involved with decision making (in this case, the process of producing content). In my opinion, people in this industry should always remember how important it is to work hands on with kids like the dragons in today’s session.
I’ll leave you with this note I jotted down – “Could children make more decisions than they do already?”
More to come soon! Cheers!
– Christine
Check out this video of the Mini Dragons