A Delicate Balance

A major theme that kept popping up in “Putting the Education back in ‘Educational’ Apps” was that of between potentially conflicting “pillars of Learning Science.” The largest conflict was that which exists between making an app entertaining, but not to the level where it becomes distracting to a child(or adult for that matter!). I feel like an interesting question to explore in class tomorrow would be strategies for determining where a given app or product falls in dichotomies like the one I mentioned above.

I felt myself spending a lot of time comparing Hirsh-Pasek et el.’s evaluative criteria to Wartella and Jenning’s which we encountered in the first class. Something I found interesting was how Hirsh’s framework does not mention social or gender inclusivity while Wartella focuses in on these issues. I feel like gender and racial inclusiveness are key to stimulating engagement and tying children into the narrative of a learning experience, so I wonder why Hirsh and co. chose to exclude it from their paper?

While Hirsh and co.’s criteria seems to ignore some key issues, it feels much more intuitive than Wartella and Jenning’s rubric. I feel that the Hirsh-Pasek et el. evaluative criteria also allow more room for critical exploration of an app, challenging the reviewer to define the specific features of a given product categorize it into a given quadrant as opposed to Wartella and Jenning’s rubric which is much more rigourosly defined. Hirsh’s evaluative criteria is a guided exploration of a product while Wartella’s is more didactic 😉

Ultimately I feel like the two criteria compliment each other nicely and a more comprehensive evaluative framework could be built through careful synthesis of the two.