MEXICO CITY, Mexico. KidZania Journal. July 20, 2012. (English). -The Central Government of KidZania was honored to receive some of the members of the KidZania Advisory Committee this week. The KidZania Advisory Committee is a small, handpicked group. The Advisors come from a wide range of fields including Education, Entertainment, Marketing, Consumer Research, Accessibility, Play Theory and Digital Safety, and are major influencers via their work, blogging, publications and speaking engagements.  Each Advisor was selected based on the significant contributions they’ve made in their own field.  

KidZania has created the Advisory Committee to share their expertise with the KidZania US team as we plan for opening the first KidZania location in the US. The group visited the Central Government of KidZania, as well as KidZania Santa Fe and KidZania Cuicuilco to learn more about and experience KidZania in order to then be able to reflect and advise us as we plan for the US.

From left to right: Erick Galicia -Counselor, KidZania US-, Perrin Kaplan -President & Founder, Zebra Partners-, Cammie Dunaway -Governor of KidZania USA and Minister of Propaganda, KidZania-, Dr. Alison Bryant -President & Founder, PlayScience-, Andrew Ortony -Professor of Education, Psychology and Computer Science at Northwestern University-, Marsali Hancock -President, iKeepSafe-, Mark Snell -Minister of Culture, KidZania-, Mary Heston -Director, WiredMoms-, Enrique Mena -Minister of Communications, KidZania-, Lully González -Ministry of Culture, KidZania.

Members of the Advisory Commitee that visited KidZania this week were:

Marsali Hancock – President of Internet Keep Safe Coalition. Marsali speaks nationally and internationally on digital citizenship issues: cyber-safety, security and ethics/responsibility. She serves on industry consumer advisory boards and participates with online safety committees for industry leaders: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, AOL, Symantec and Webroot. She is also active internationally as a member of the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Child Online Protection Group (COP). She was invited by the EastWest Institute (EWI) to participate in its Worldwide Cybersecurity Summits, exploring new measures to secure the world’s digital infrastructure. Working with the Chinese government, Ms. Hancock produced two bilingual editions of children’s books from the Faux Paw the Techno Cat Internet Safety series: the books (Mandarin-English) address safe and ethical downloading and Internet addiction/managing screen time and are distributed to Beijing schools. Marsali is one of the noted contributors to the FTC’s NetCetera and served on the Internet Safety Technical Task Force of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, convened by 49 state attorneys general and Fox Interactive-MySpace. She oversees iKeepSafe Coalition business development, strategic plans, and partnerships, including the development of the Faux Paw the Techno Cat® Internet Safety Series and support curriculum, which reaches into more than 100 countries. She also oversees iKeepSafe’s Generation Safe™: New Media Mentor for Digital Citizenship, a new product to help schools navigate the digital environment, protect them from liability, and integrate technology into existing whole school initiatives.

Dr. Andrew Ortony – Professor of education, psychology and computer science at Northwestern University. He is a cognitive scientist whose three primary research areas are (1) emotion, especially the relation between emotion, cognition, behavior and personality, (2) computational social cognition and (3) metaphor, especially the relation between knowledge representation and the processes involved in the production and comprehension of metaphors. His books include The Cognitive Structure of Emotions and a landmark edited volume, Metaphor and Thought. Ortony serves or has served on the editorial boards of Cognition & Emotion, Emotion Review, Computational Intelligence, Discourse Processes, Instructional Science, The Journal of the Learning Sciences and Metaphor and Symbol. Andrew is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, a charter fellow of the American Psychological Society, and a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Cognitive Science Society, and the International Society for Research on Emotion.

Mary Heston – Director, Wired Moms. Having spent much of her career in the digital world and as c-founder of Wiredmoms, Mary is fresh from having lived in Dubai, which may serve as a secondary, but helpful tool for KidZania. Mary has been a blogger for over 15 years. In the mid 90s, she founded the StayAtHomeMom. Mary has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show discussing connecting with your kids. She is a frequent speaker, including appearances at Wired Safety’s “Stop Cyberbullying” roundtable, Build-a-Bear “Connecting in the CyBear Century” and The Wired Moms Summit at Microsoft.

Dr. J. Alison Bryant – Founder & President of PlayScience. Alison founded PlayScience in 2010 to fulfill an industry need for a firm that could help companies and organizations create better, more innovative, and more positively impactful media and technology. She also runs PlayLab, a physical and virtual research space designed for innovative product development. In addition, she holds senior roles at several technology start-ups, including Activation Media and FunGoPlay. Alison was formerly the Senior Research Director of Dig-ital Research & Strategy for the Nickelodeon/MTV Net-works Kids & Family Group, where she led Nick’s efforts to understand the digital lives of consumers, conducting research on a variety of platforms: online, console and handheld gaming, interactive television, and mobile among them. Prior to Nickelodeon, she was an assistant professor of communication at Indiana University. Dr. Bryant is a well-known author and speaker and has published three edited books – The Children’s Televi-sion Community, Television and the American Family (2nd Ed), and Service-Learning in the University Classroom. She is presently associate editor for the Journal of Children & Media, and was the Chair of the Children, Adolescents, & Media division of the International Co-munication Association. Her Ph.D. is from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California.

Visitors were bestowed with the "Key to the City"

Marsali Hancock shows her "Key to the City"