While reading this, I also couldn’t help but think about the disparities between these families and those in lower SES or culturally diverse families. In one section, the study describes not only are there knowledge and SEL payoffs to learning this stuff early, there are other developments such as new roles in the community, invitation to apprenticeship, etc. It’s as if opportunities beget more opportunities. So how are we to expect families who aren’t in the right neighborhoods or backgrounds to get into the game? It re-affirms for me the need for investment in areas such as mentoring programs and social networks where students can draw motivation and information from others if they cannot get that from their parents.

I’m also struck by the important of parent experience to help students persist through challenging periods of learning by drawing on their own experiences. However, we know most parents won’t have those experiences to draw from. One opportunity that I see might be to consider how the child might teach parents. If I recall from the Teachable Agent work, students learn better when they know they are going to be teaching it to someone else. What if that someone was a parent? Perhaps it just takes reframing the problem to see the opportunity in front of us building more ways for children to teach parents on the new technologies and skills they’re exposed to at school and in life.

We know that co-viewing can support a child’s development but very few parents know this research or know how to act on it. And most toys, games, apps offer limited guidance directed to parents around how they can engage. The design challenge would be to design either a platform, product, or something else for parents to feel more confident and enabled to participate in a child’s interaction with an app or game.

Team: Mohamad and Lisa

The ‘for whom’ part raises a lot of questions around equity. Who will have access to the latest and greatest game technology? Knowing that technology usually starts high end down and trickles down, should we expect that only students in developed countries, in the top income bracket, will have access? And if that is not what we hope to see, then what can we do about it? Does that responsibility fall on the government to set policies around it? Parents / teachers to demand it? Designers to acknowledge and build for wider access?

The ‘in what context’ is also interesting. I was really struck by the line: “As designed cultures, persistent world games function more like digital nations than like traditional games, making them intriguing sites for studying how people reciprocally inhabit and create culture (p. 23)” While observing such environments can be like a laboratory for how societies function, designers also have a role to play in shaping what kind of world they want to see. That is both powerful and daunting for designers. If the only context that exists today are videogames designed by private enterprises and the military, then parents and teachers should be asking themselves what kind of context they want their students exposed to.

One thing that really stuck out to me about the Rebecca Black research was her use of data to support her thesis. While I commend her for the thorough analysis on Mattel’s Barbie Girls and Xtractaurs online sites, I was a little confused by what data she used to support her idea. She lost me when I saw her present the misspelled words table:

To me, this data does not necessarily support her notion that the designers of boys-oriented virtual network were intentionally emphasizing certain gender roles and life opportunities. Rather, it simply highlights that there are good and bad designers out there. And unfortunately, Barbie Girls had a worse team working on the project. I’m aware this oversimplifies and may provoke some people, but I do think this article raised for me the question of how researchers present and use data in their research.

The first set, GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine, tells the story of Goldie who builds a spinning machine to help her dog, Nacho, chase his tail. What ultimately gets built is a simple Rube Goldberg-inspired machine that spins many characters. GoldieBlox is designed for girls aged 4-9 years old. The characters, colors and storylines intentionally appeal to girls. For example, two storybooks involve princesses. GoldieBlox seems to be taking a page out of Lego’s recent Friends Collection playbook, to “earnestly meet girls halfway in an attempt to stoke their interest in engineering” (Orenstein, p.2). Executives at Lego found that “in order to be gender-fair…they have to be gender-specific” (Orenstein, p. 2). However, not everyone feels this way. Many believe these toys targeted towards girls run the risk of reinforcing stereotype (Gray).

Personally, I commend GoldieBlox for creating a toy set that appeals to girls and can break down any stereotypes of girls as builders and engineers. As for the specific set I played with, the book’s storyline and instructions were simple to follow with great drawings. At the end of the book, there were suggestions for other ‘machines’ to build which offers some variety in play. One critique is around the text. Vocabulary varied throughout the book from simple to very complex (‘centrifuge’). I know GoldieBlox is introducing an app and website in addition to the set so these digital offerings might be great opportunities to be more consistent in lexical density and vary by age, allowing different reading levels. The physical set was mostly easy to handle, though I did have some trouble sticking the pegs onto the board. For younger ages, an adult might need to support. One area to consider for future sets is an opportunity to make the set a more social experience – whether a friend or parent to join in the building fun. This might mean different storybooks for social play versus independent play or offering extra prompts through an app experience.

Finally, the GoldieBlox website offers a way for girls to upload videos of their own creation. It’s a fun sharing experience but I wonder how realistic it is for girls aged 4-9 to make/upload videos. Current videos are all very professional so serves only as inspiration. One feature I really like for the website is the warning prompt when you click to the iTunes store or YouTube. It’s not perfect but serves to draw kids attention and hopefully prevent them from leaving the page. As GoldieBlox moves towards more digital offerings, there will be more challenges in terms of matching digital ability, privacy and security concerns. Instead, I would recommend making these digital offerings geared towards parents or teachers on how best to leverage the physical toy sets and engage their tiny learners.

Personally, I really appreciated that each example was grounded in evidence from the Science of Learning and the parallels that were made to describe how researchers have evaluated it for television in the past. I hope to be able to apply their framework when I do my technology review assignment and as I look for edtech jobs after school.

“Tacit, routine expectations of everyday life are likely to be among the most powerful cultural experiences – especially because they are expected and unexamined by most participants” (Rogoff, p. 491). This made me ponder what the implicit social cues we are sending to children when adults are constantly on their phones (taking photos, checking email, posting to social media). Even if parents ensure that they have placed media/technology restrictions on their child, what values and scripts are they signaling to their children when they are constantly engaged with their devices?