I loved reading about the maker movement and the digital fabrication paper. I can see how these methods of learning would probably really engage students and gear their education towards real world action and problem-solving.

However, I have a few questions about it. Coming from a place where the best schools in the country have around 50 kids in a class and the worst don’t even have proper teachers, I can see how these movements can remain inaccessible to a large part of the world’s population. Given this, won’t this just lead to greater educational equity and lead to the further mystifying of technology for some parts of the world?

Additionally, I’m not sure how I feel about “the activity, which was originally a history project, becoming a sophisticated mathematics project. ” The reverse is hardly ever true and never encouraged to be true as a result of any movement. If as a society we start valuing “making”, “creating” and “innovating”, where will the traditional humanities which lay emphasis on thinking and analyzing fall? Given there already diminishing importance won’t this just lead to further issues?

In this particular example, it seemed as if the class learnt the actual history aspect of i.e. the architectural features of the various monuments pretty quickly and spent majority of the time designing and building it. That sounds like engineering/architecture with a bit of history thrown in to me.

I found the concept of place-based education to be very relevant. Something that I have heard many students in school complain about is how they feel their education isn’t relevant to ‘real’ life and that after school they’re going to forget everything that they have learnt anyway.

Using the principles of place-based education, people will not only grasp material more easily since it will be easier for them integrate it with prior knowledge but they will believe that what they’re learning is important which will hopefully act as a motivator.

On a different note, it was sad to see how unconscious, instilled stereotypes impact the informal scientific learning of girls. While the findings of the paper were extremely unfortunate, they were also reassuring in that they offered a plausible explanation for the gender-gap in scientific learning. I wonder if this phenomenon is noticed when families engage in activities in domains typically considered to be feminine. Do parents explain more to girls then?

The paper mentioned that using cool-math games may actually increase the achievement gap. This seems like a dire negative effect of a seemingly helpful at best and innocuous at worst website. However, children may go on this website, play games and mentally attribute the time they spend on it as time spent doing math. However, if/when they see no improvement in there math, they may feel that they are naturally uninclined towards math and the fact that there are no results for all there work may be demotivating.

I played a few games on cool-math games after reading the paper and if they do improve math skills they do it in a HIGHLY indirect way. One game that I played involved making a character move through an easily navigable maze and collect stars. Absolutely no math skills and even problem solving skills. The idea of a child spending hours on something like this under the illusion that he/she is developing math skills makes me sad.

Such websites mislead people and take advantage of their vulnerability and really should be held accountable for the false claims they make.

I could personally relate with so much that they mentioned in the piece. I admit that one big motivation for my continued presence on the fanfiction website were the reviews and the followers that my story got. I found the following quote extremely insightful – “teens are motivated to write by … their words’ potential to make an impact on their communities” . This is because the idea that something I created doesn’t just sit in a forgotten folder on my computer but is actually appreciated and enjoyed by other people greatly motivated me to continue writing on fanfiction.

I remember how the fan community shaped my own creative works. I would often find myself evaluating how popular stories on particular characters were before writing them, see what genres were popular etc. Also, I was more likely to continue and finish stories that got more follows and reviews.

Something the article didn’t mention was how these websites channel the anonymity the internet offers in a positive way. Many people, especially developing children, would probably not be comfortable offering up their work for open critique and viewing to millions of people. However, under a pseudonym, people are able to express themselves in spite of limited confidence or esteem. This in turn helps build confidence.

While I think this is a great tool to be leveraged, I can image me not being as excited about fansites if I encountered it in an educational setting. Also, the very nature of these sites are such that they don’t appeal to everyone. They already appeal to a set of people more into reading and writing/art/creating some other kind of media. (E.g. A lot of the people on these forums are trying to be professional writers.) So even if we do incorporate in an educational setting it may not have the desired effect of getting students involved in creating content informally. The ones who do want to will probably find these opportunities on their own and the ones who don’t want to might just treat it as another assignment.

For my review and redesign I have chosen the application Toca Kitchen 2. This app has over 210,000 downloads only on the iStore and is aimed for children between 3-8 years-old. With an approximate rating of 4.3 stars, this app seems to be extremely enjoyable.

The usage of the app is simple: users select a character from a choice of three characters and proceed to make plates of food that the character can eat. The left side of the screen has shelves with food and the right shelves with cooking utensils such as frying pans, knives, boiling pots etc. Players can simply drag and drop the food/ cooking utensils to use them.

First, I am going to focus on the positives of the app. The first thing that I noticed and appreciated about this app was the gender, racial and cultural neutrality. The three characters offered by the app are quite cartoonish and don’t seem to come from any particular race and can be interpreted to belong to any race or none. (one of the characters is like a humanoid with teeth sticking out and ears sticking out from the top of his head.) Additionally, the app doesn’t use language but universal cues such as a character sighing, licking his/her lips, smiling etc. to convey messages. Also, the app doesn’t play to any gender norms and is gender neutral.

As far as the design and graphics are concerned, the app is beyond approach. The intuitive usage of the app is what possibly hooks young children and ensures that they pick up the game quickly. The app is manipulated completely by the users and the users are free to do whatever they want to. Hence, it is highly active. The bright, funny and colorful graphics then probably keep children engaged and attentive. The characters tend to have amusing responses to certain foods such as spitting out the food or sticking out their tongue and this, along with the complete freedom to do whatever they want, ensures that kids are engaged.

As far as the meaningful pillar is concerned, the app is effective to a certain extent. Children are using vegetables, fruits, meats (there is a vegetarian option for the game also!) to cook. They can hopefully draw connections between what they eat and what they are feeding the characters. This way they should be able to make meaningful connections. However, other than this usage of everyday food, the app offers no additional route for meaning making.

On the social interaction pillar the app falls short. While it is possible for many kids to be playing and looking at the same screen, the app offers no additional facilities for it. The game is possible only in single player mode and has no reason for interactivity.

So while the app rates well on active and engaging pillars, fairly decently on the meaningful pillar, it rates low on the interactivity pillar.

As far as the learning goals are concerned, there don’t seem to be any. One of the major selling strategies of the application is that it is essentially not a game but a ‘digital toy’. This means that the app allows the kids to freely play with it however they want to with no strategy, covert learning goals or way to win the game. There are no tangible rewards such as points. This approach while interesting, limits the teaching opportunities the app has.

With just a few minor tweaks, this app can potentially be useful for teaching kids about nutrition. The revisions that I am going to suggest will hopefully increase the learning goals of the app while staying somewhat true to its ethos of being a ‘toy’. The revisions lie mainly in four factors-

1)Asking the users for their age and activities they enjoy doing

2) The characters making requests for food.

3) Adding a happiness and health meter. The happiness meter should fluctuate depending on how well the children adhere to character request and the health meter according to the nutrition in the food.

4) One pop-up question about the consequences of the meal the character ate.

First, the app can ask the children for their age and some activities that they enjoy doing (Eg. playing football, dancing, singing) . It should choose its ‘teaching level’ according to the age of the child and store the activities that they are doing. (The purpose for this is simply meaning making so that the child can relate this to their own lives and this feature can be removed)

The characters can make requests for the kinds of meals they want (Eg. I want to eat a vegetable, fruit and some meat so that I am fit while INSERT ACTIVITY  today, OR I want to be unhealthy today. Give me chocolate, bread and fried vegetables!  For older kids- ‘I want a meal rich in proteins, vitamin A and carbohydrates’, ‘I want to grow tall. Feed me food that will help me?’ , ‘Give me a balanced meal today!’) The kids should then try and make those meals. Depending on how well they adhere to the task the happiness meter of the character should fluctuate.

Once the character has been fed, depending on the meal, the character can respond. If the meal is high on the happiness meter characters can lick their lips and smile. Otherwise if the meal is low on the happiness meter, the character can stick out their tongue and show dissatisfaction as they do now. There can then be a pop up menu with all the food options asking children what they think the character would prefer to eat depending on the request. If the child picks the wrong items, the app should show the children an example of a meal that matches the request. (Although this would be a good opportunity to make the child seek an adult, I feel that will limit the app in other ways.)

For older kids, there can be another message after that depending on the food the character ate. (Eg. meal high on chocolate- ‘I was having fun while INSERT ACTIVITY but then my tooth began aching! What do you think I ate that lead to this?’)

This way, simply by allowing the characters to make requests, adding the questions and tweaking the feedback system, the app can potentially teach children about nutrition.

It was disheartening to read the Black et al paper and seeing that even though politically and theoretically we have achieved gender equality to a certain extent, true equality is still a long way to go. It is surprising how the developers of these games (probably a lot of them male) make assumptions about each gender and proceed to make theses games which leads to a vicious cycle. These games in turn probably influence children which leads them to behave a certain way and develop certain interests. These influences then just propagate stereotypes and seem to legitimize these assumptions.

As the paper showed the websites aimed for boys not only had higher language complexity but also less frivolous content. The names of the newspapers alone (Buzz and Goss for girls and Community News and Updates for boys) demonstrate the rooted gender stereotypes in the minds of these developers which unfortunately go on to influence an entire generation of children.

I looked up to see why the Barbie girls website was taken down. I was hoping that it was because of awareness regarding the content of the website and the gendered stereotypes it promoted but that wasn’t the case. It was taken down because the ‘chatroom’ was becoming dangerous as a haven for pedophiles.

I went on the barbie website after that to see if the website had similar content and was happy to see that the home page had images of barbie dressed in different professional clothing telling girls that if they wanted they could be astronauts, doctors, engineer or ‘anything they wanted to be’. However, the categories for the games were ‘Fashion, Sports, Pets, Fairytales’. (I wonder why certain ideas such as girls like fashion and girls like pink exist. None of the girls I know have pink as their favorite color or are into fashion.)

I remember crying when his character in the Harry Potter novels died. I was undoubtedly (probably still am) very attached to him. This was probably because I loved how he portrayed an adult with all the safety, security and wisdom that an adult embodies while at the same being childlike, playful and someone extremely relatable.