TOYBOX at the 2026 CSSE Conference

The Canadian Society for the Study of Education’s conference was brought to the University of Winnipeg this year! It was amazing to see guests from all over the world welcomed to our university, and TOYBOX had a few presentations to showcase:

Litty and Nume welcome visitors to the University of Winnipeg!

First, our graphic design and illustration team lead facilitators, Herlinda Dalayoan and Brian Guevarra, showcased a presentation that revolved around the ways that TOYBOX navigates the current digital landscape. The TOYBOX project was always intended to cater towards caregivers and their children, providing engaging activities that aided in early childhood development skills. Yet with the growing amount of devices entering the household, we have found ourselves placed within the overlapping space between childhood education and entertainment.

Herlinda and Brian present the ways that TOYBOX navigates the current digital lanscape.

In this day in age, children are oftentimes exposed to the internet before they are even walking. This has left us to ponder on how we can work within digital spaces in ways that are educational, valuable, and safe for family, specifically child, consumption. Much of the content that algorithms push onto children's “for you” pages are manufactured with bright colours, fast paced images, and little to no substance in order to encourage children to increase their screen time. With the introduction of AI generation, this content can be posted at inhuman rates to keep audiences glued to the screen.

TOYBOX hopes to combat this by creating content that fuses online resources with real world engagement. Our activities use a cast of colourful characters to act as guides for children to learn and play with, rather than to mindlessly watch. Our video and animated content is aimed to act as tutorials for families to copy in real time. All in all, we hope that our digital content acts as tools for users to introduce real world learning into everyday lives. 

Next, James Lesyk, Camryn Kowalchuk and Tegwen Bryan presented their poster about the recent TOYBOX study that was conducted this past fall and winter. This study was done to see if our activities are effective in helping children improve their numbers, letters and emotions knowledge. We had 8 participating early childhood education centres from across the province, with over 100 children. 

After 5 weeks of TOYBOX activities 3 times a week with a research assistant, the children in the literacy showed letter knowledge improvement against all other groups. The same was seen for emotions labelling in the wellness group. This was our first time measuring our wellness activities and we were interested in emotion knowledge. One notable finding was that improvement in emotion term recognition was not seen for the easiest or the hardest emotions, but for the mid-level difficulty emotions, words like proud, embarrassed, frustrated, etc.

Tegwen, Sheri-Lynn, Nume, James and Camryn present their poster on TOYBOX's latest study.

As for numeracy, there were no overall improvements for the numbers group compared to the others on number knowledge, but that group did improve on the skill of cardinality (ability to name how many items are in a set), while the other groups did not. We hope with more participants in the study, we will be able to see some improvements in numeracy. 

We had a great time showing our poster to other presenters and hearing about their work from all around the world!

Our Litty and Nume mascots also had the chance to tour around the conference, meeting new people and having a fun time!