If we assume that this study is correct, that games like WoW do encourage “scientific habits of mind,” then it seems the logical next step would be to look at how science class can be more like WoW. What are the attributes that make an MMO educationally salient and motivationally compelling; and how can those attributes be brought to bear on the classroom?

I think one advantage of a virtual simulated world, when it is well-designed, is that it makes players aware that there is a hidden system governing the whole game that can be “beat” or uncovered. Coupled with this system is a narrative, usually with a clear goal in mind like amassing the largest army, the most land, etc. These may be clear attributes of the simulated world, but they are not clear attributes of the real world.

Therefore, I think it could be interesting to think of what kinds of overarching narratives or “game designs” might be used in formal science learning to help students naturally engage in scientific modes of thought and processes out of a desire to uncover systems of gain positive advantage of some kind.

For example, a group of children playing “house” generate their own story, make up their own rules and roles, solve problems, and socially negotiate in a real-world setting. However, in most video game play, the story, setting, characters, and rules are already established, i.e. you are James Bond looking for enemies to shoot. In this case, it seems like play becomes more about strategizing, accomplishing tasks, and making choices within a given set of rules. While another game might offer a totally different play experience, i.e. Minecraft, which allows players to create their own worlds, the child is still playing within a very rule-based system. In contrast, pure imaginative play could almost be said to be limitless. So, when we talk about “playing” the Sims and “playing” house, the nature of play seems very different in practice, which implies that the learning outcomes are too.

This thought isn’t really mine–the article already brings up the difficulty of generalizing video games as a single entity of play. That said, the writers were talking more in terms of the many different mechanics that make up video games that make measurement difficult. They did not necessarily mention the developmental differences between types of play (video game vs. pretend play), and I would be interested to learn more about that since each type of play is kind of like a type of mechanic. Are there certain play mechanics (I don’t mean teaching mechanics) that are better for development and learning than others?

I was also interested in the finding that people who play shooter games showed developmental strengths: “…faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial resolution in visual processing, and enhanced mental rotation abilities” (p.68). I would be curious to know how much these skills were a result of the game mechanic itself vs. the narrative context. For example, if the same mechanic were used in a narrative context that didn’t involve a life-or-death scenario, would we see the same skill set, or are we already primed to pay more attention to and learn more when placed in a violent or high-stakes context? To put it bluntly and somewhat controversially, could violence, in this case, be enhancing learning?

In its simplest description, Hello Barbie is a Barbie doll that children can have conversations with. More specifically, it is an electronic doll with a hidden microphone, speaker, and wireless capability. As far as I understand, when Barbie is turned on and connected to wi-fi, she also connects to Toy Talk’s speech recognition technology (ASR) and the program Toy Talk uses to “code” the conversations. When a child talks to Barbie, the ASR makes a hypothesis about what was said, then analyzes it in the coded conversation, and Barbie responds as written.

In terms of logic, Barbie’s conversations follow a game-like structure in order to better predict what a child might be saying. For example, rather than saying, “Hello! What do you want to talk about?” Barbie defaults to taking control of the conversation and suggesting topics, such as going on a pretend horse ride or playing news reporter. She asks guiding questions in each scenario like, “What’s your horse’s name?” or “Should we go right or left?” or “Who’s your best friend?” If Barbie did not do this and let the child take charge of the conversation, she would not really work.

Part of the problem is that ASR technology is not sophisticated enough to understand children’s voices very well. The technology, developed by Microsoft, “learned” to listen largely from male gamers on XBox. Because of this, and perhaps just because children aren’t as precise with their speech, the ASR hypothesis is probably only right about 30% of the time. When Barbie does not understand what the child said, she will give a kind of non-response like, “Huh. So anyway,…” and steer the conversation back on the track she originally laid out.

That said, children can direct the conversation to some extent. The program accounts for something Toy Talk refers to as “interjections,” which are certain words or phrases that the toy is always listening for. For example, if Barbie is talking about horses and you suddenly ask her, “How old are you?” she will sometimes answer. I say sometimes because these interjections don’t work very well. They are difficult to code given that after each thing Barbie says, she will be “listening” for very specific inputs that take priority over the interjections. For example, she might interpret that you simply said your horse’s name is, “How old are you?” and reply by saying something like, “Cool! What a great name.”

Finally, as we’ve discussed, whatever the child says to Barbie is recorded and kept on Toy Talk’s server. When parents get the toy, the agree to this pretty explicitly, but they have to agree in order to use the toy. The company collects this audio data in order to analyze how the toy is working and where to make improvements. (They also showcase funny audio clips on their website, with permission.) Because the toy is essentially “live,” fixes can be made to the conversation logic on the fly and immediately pushed out to the server. I do not know if Toy Talk has other plans for this audio data. It may help the ASR “learn” to hear children’s voices better. In any case, there is so much data that hardly anyone at Toy Talk (except the intern!) is listening to all of it, or even much of it. Still, I think it does present an ethical issue, both in terms of privacy (COPPA, anyone?) and responsibility. For example, I wonder what Toy Talk would do if they overhead a child telling Barbie she was being abused, or something else that would require intervention in any other setting.

In terms of child development, I think this toy does offer some advantages, even though it is not marketed as an educational toy. First of all, the writers were careful to make Hello Barbie a better female role model than Barbie has been in the past. Hello Barbie talks about enjoying school and math class, being kind to others, trying your best, and aspiring to be a scientist. Talking with Hello Barbie might also expose children to new vocabulary and storytelling structures to support language development. While there is not any overt curriculum in Barbie’s conversations, she will occasionally ask questions that take a certain amount of thought or social-emotional intelligence to answer, like what to do if you’re nervous for a test, or have trouble finishing your homework. Barbie also often expresses happiness to talk to the child, which may give children a greater sense of worth.

That said, Hello Barbie could be redesigned to better support children’s development. At the very least, Barbie’s conversations could be coded with more curriculum. I don’t mean that Hello Barbie should ask the child, “What is 2 + 2?” and listen for “four.” Rather, her conversations could be designed to really encourage children to think deeply or make new connections about things that impact their lives. The conversations could even be scaffolded in a way to build upon previous knowledge. From the audio data that I did listen to, I noticed that children were eager to talk when the toy or character needed help. Hello Barbie was always fairly competent, and at times it felt like she didn’t need the child at all, even if she expressed being the child’s “best friend.” Perhaps if Barbie regarded the child as the expert, children might feel more “listened to.” I would also be curious to study how much it matters to children whether or not they feel like Barbie heard exactly what they said, or if children simply want to talk to her and have her support.

Another small way to re-design the toy would be to think about the toy object itself. There is no real reason that Hello Barbie is a doll because her conversations have nothing to do with her being a moveable “body.” I think the designers could have taken better advantage of using the actual doll body in concert with the conversational feature. For example, Barbie could ask the child to make her walk, sense movement, and then ask the child where they are going. Right now, Hello Barbie’s body is little more than a telephone receiver. Encouraging the child to play with the doll like a traditional doll might put the child more at the helm of their own play and learning, rather than waiting on Barbie to find out what happens next.

I am not sure how to solve or redesign the problem of the audio data itself. I don’t know enough about ASR technology to understand whether or not there is a way around this issue, but I don’t know that there is one. Perhaps simply making it more explicit to parents that the audio is being recorded and that they can go into their account and erase it at any time would be the best approach to protect children.

A more radical re-design of Hello Barbie is one that I am actually thinking about doing some version of for my Master’s project. In this re-design, children would have access to the same software that the Toy Talk writers use to code the toy. Of course, the program would be more kid-facing so that young children could use it on their own. This would largely impact the complexity of the toy as a conversational tool, but it would give children the power to voice the toy themselves, rather than the other way around. Of course, there are limitations with this as well since the child would need to either choose only from pre-recorded lines, or else record the dialogue in their own voice. Still, I think this kind of play activity would require more thought and imagination from the child than simply answering Hello Barbie’s “yes or no” questions.

Overall, I think Hello Barbie and Toy Talk’s technology have a lot of potential as a educational tool, but it is not fully being realized. An offshoot of Pixar Animation Studios, perhaps Toy Talk is still thinking more in terms of entertaining children with its writing, rather than thinking from a play-first approach. I think Toy Talk will need to solve its privacy issues and conduct more in-depth research with how children interact with the technology to make sure its designs are responsible.

What I didn’t understand about this argument was that the authors begin by talking about how children are empathetic toward robots, and then argue that robots aren’t good for children because children may not be empathetic towards them. The research they site already implies that children do believe they should treat life-like robots with care, excepting certain rights and privileges within a larger society.

I understand the developmental implications of relating to a robot whose rights exist in a child’s mind somewhere between a vending machine and a human, but I don’t see how that necessarily leads to adolescents dominating sex robots. To me, this argument seemed not so unlike a common illogical argument against same-sex marriage that asks whether legalizing same-sex marriage would set into a motion an “anything goes” society in which a man could marry his horse.

I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t cautions to heed with regards to interactions with robots and child development. I just think that the more interesting part of this paper was that children were largely empathetic towards the robots and treated them as one might treat a real social entity. I wondered how robots might be leveraged to actually help children practice and develop their potential for caring behaviors, rather than neglect them.

I was particularly interested in a distinction made between “physically active” and “mentally active” when it comes to interacting with an app: “Tapping in a response to something on a screen to make it rise is ‘minds-off,’ but activities such as purposefully figuring out where a puzzle piece goes or learning about abstract concepts such as cardinality or addition are minds-on.” (p. 8)

Having designed preschool learning apps, I didn’t find this to be a very useful distinction because physical activity is described in terms of its relation to the app’s interactive design, but the mental activity is not. In other words, in the first example (tapping to make something rise), I have an idea of what is happening on screen and what the child might be doing, but in the second (learning about abstract concepts), I do not.

Later, when exploring the concept of engagement, Hirsh-Patek writes, “When each touch or swipe is met with an immediate response, children feel in control, maintain their focus, and continue the interaction.” (p. 12) This seems problematic in light of the previous quote. If tapping to get immediate feedback is minds-off but engagement-on, then it might follow that we have a conflict between achieving engagement and achieving learning.

Many of the conversations I had when designing educational apps was similar: What compromises should we make to satisfy the designers (who want fun), and the researchers (who want education)? While I am simplifying the conflict to some extent, I think both parties would agree to its general truth.

However, I am curious about whether or not this conflict really exists, or if we simply aren’t thinking about designing educational apps in the right way. I am interested in how interactive, educational media can be designed in such a way that the game mechanic itself is a reflection or expression of the learning process. In other words, I wonder if there’s a way to bring physical activity and mental activity into a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other when designing. This would seem to maximize both engagement and learning, if it can be achieved.

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Finally, on a completely different topic, I was interested in what the reading said about the importance of social relationships in learning, and where to find literature on creating the types of characters and parasocial relationships that children of different ages are most drawn to and influenced by.