That being said, there is always the danger that the pendulum will swing too far in the maker direction and abandon the practice of having its roots in theory. One of the major issues of this class has been how to ground the staggering amount of “making” that is going on in the educational technology space right now in theory. I think that there is a nontrivial danger that if schools start to over emphasize making it will be to the detriment of theory based approaches to solution.

I also saw this is in my own life. My dad was also an engineer and that fact allowed him to work with me on math homework in a way that my mom never would. She would get stressed out when I asked her questions, I can’t imagine how stressful and frustrating math would have been for me had my dad not been willing to engage with me and help me through my issues.

Goal : funbrain is a K-8 targeted educational game sight.

Funbrain.com Review

Funbrain.com boasts that they are the #1 website for educational games for children K-8. I guess my question to them would be, #1 in what? Funbrain is divided into four distinct sections: “math games” which predictably has links to games involving math, “reading” who have some grammar and reading comprehension exercises but also inexplicably transports users away from funbrain to sites trying to sell comics to kids(I was offered a great deal on “Galactic Hotdogs”), “fun arcade” and “playground”. I will focus the remainder of this review on the math games and reading section.

In the math games section I played two games: “Math Baseball” and “Space Slingshot”. “Math Baseball” was what Hirsh-Pasek described as a first wave educational product which essentially just digitized traditional arithmetic worksheets of which we were all so fond. The game makes some effort to engage the user by tallying runs and outs and presenting the user with “high risk/reward” situations where they are encourage to drive in runs by answering questions correctly. A positive aspect of “Math Baseball” is the user defined difficulty and content parameters. Before starting, the user may choose which arithmetic operations to include in the game and what difficulty these operations should be performed at.

“Space Slingshot” was a more engaging, though also a less purely educational, game. In “Space Slingshot” a player is asked to solve addition and subtraction problems by firing aliens from a slingshot at bubbles containing the correct answer. This style of play is far more interesting than simply entering answers into a text box, however the difficulty was not variable and thus was quite basic in its problems.

In the reading section I played the game “Grammar Gorilla.” Like “Math Baseball”, “Grammar Gorilla” is essentially a digital version of a grammar worksheet that one would find in elementary school workbooks. The colorful dancing gorilla’s on the sides of the screen distracted from the activity and added little in the way of engaging content. “Grammar Gorilla” does provide detailed explanations of every part of speech, however it does not prompt the user to consult these explanations upon getting a question wrong.

Despite funbrain.com’s claims to be the #1 education site, I think it leaves a lot to be desired. Their games encouraged wrote learning in the absence of conceptual frameworks and provided little to engage the user beyond what a pencil and paper worksheet would. What’s more, the lack of instructional material after getting questions wrong means that a user could get stuck in loops and reinforce misunderstandings of concepts. All in all, funbrain.com is a primitive educational technology good only for getting kids repetitions on basic skills.

Funbrain.com Redesign

I have two major areas for improvement for funbrain. The first is that more emphasis needs to be placed on the educational content. Upon finishing “Math Baseball”, I was prompted to play games such as “Penguin Invader” and “Super He” which fall in the “fun arcade” section of the site. As the site’s major usefulness is providing children in need of drill extra repetitions with basic grammar and arithmetic skills, it is important to loop them not to mindless flash games but instead more practice on the same or similar skills. Learning Science has shown us that uninterrupted periods of learning are far more effective than ones punctuated with non-educational and distracting material. Furthermore, many of the suggested games at the end of “Math Baseball” actually transported the user away from funbrain to paid sights. Funbrain should be a self-contained ecosystem, with the possible exception of sourcing lessons or instructional pieces from third parties.

The second area for improvement is the feedback given in funbrain games. It is important that when a user gets a question wrong they are alerted to the fact and presented with either the right answer, or some material in which they can ascertain the correct answer. Expecting young children to be able to dig through blocks of text to find a mistake they haven’t even identified is absurd.

The first being that a “smart” toy is capable of creating and communicating imaginary situations to third parties without the child’s help. While the child could pick up communication skills by mimicking the linguistic structures that the “smart” toy uses. However, this could have several pitfalls. The first being that a “smart” toys script may be, intentionally or not, syntactically or logically flawed. By simply mimicking structure, a child will internalize and employ these same errors. Another downside of children mimicking a “smart” toys response structures is the child could fall into the trap of wrote learning as opposed to gaining a deep conceptual understanding of why a given response is appropriate and complete to some query. We saw in the Hirsh-Pasek reading from last week that the process of abstraction and mapping ideas to symbolic structure, in this case grammatical ones, is the best way to truly learn and understand a concept.

A second area where “smart” toys need to be cautious is the degree of scaffolding they provide to play. Pellegrini points out that scaffolded play is useful in that it allows for multiple parties to immerse themselves in imaginary situations for longer. This is turn induces the practicing of group management skills like cooperation. However, over scaffolding play can be isolating, not requiring the participation of others which largely nullifies the positive incentives that existed for fantasy play in the first place.

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.