The Children’s Digital Media Center @ Los Angeles

Overview

The CDMC@LA was founded and directed by Dr. Patricia Greenfield, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA; the Associate Director of the Center is Dr. Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). It began in 2001 as part of the Children’s Digital Media Center (CDMC), a consortium funded for five years by the National Science Foundation. The CDMC is perhaps the most lasting legacy of Dr. Rodney R. Cocking, a cognitive developmental psychologist who was “early to understand the value of studying the computer genre that children spent most of their time with - electronic entertainment games, rather than what most researchers were focusing on—the use of computers in formal education” (Greenfield & Calvert, 2004, p. 627). Dr. Cocking established and was the Program Officer for the Developmental and Learning Sciences Program within the National Science Foundation; he launched the Children’s Research Initiative (CRI), “an initiative designed to move the field of Developmental Science forward” (Greenfield & Calvert, 2004, p. 629). The CDMC was one of the first centers to be established as part of the CRI and was a collaborative effort involving researchers at several U.S. Universities – Dr. Sandra Calvert, the Project Director at Georgetown University, Dr. Patricia Greenfield at UCLA, Dr. Barbara O’Keefe at Northwestern University, Dr. Ellen Wartella and Dr. Elizabeth Vandewater at the University of Texas at Austin.