Week 4: Fröbel’s Forgotten Gift

ccolgan — Mon, 25 Jan 2016 08:00:19 +0000

In reading “Fröbel’s Forgotten Gift…,” I couldn’t help but remember Barbie Fashion Designer from my own childhood. I didn’t own the game, but I begged my friend Victoria to play whenever I was at her house. As I recall, it was a fairly open-ended design project, though firmly within the Barbie world of “Dream Date” and “Party Surprise.” We would spend many hours debating our choices, but limited by the technology of the time, there was no way to share out with a larger community. Unfortunately, as mentioned in the article, the starter kit came with only eight sheets of the special paper needed to print out the clothes and as a result, we printed an actual outfit exactly one time. The material was far too precious to use up on an inferior costume. Usually we only played on the digital interface, losing the important step of creating a tangible finished product, something that separated the game from other platforms like Barbie Girls, the focus of the Rebecca W. Black article.

Since crafts in general and fashion specifically are so deeply tied to the female realm, I started wondering about ways that textile construction could move into a less gendered space. A tool like the LilyPad Arduino seemed like a promising way to make “soft wear” more universal, but a quick Google search revealed that the “LilyPond” website is no longer active and there seems to be little news from the formal community. Considering the long history of embroidery and sewing long before Fröbel, it seems unlikely that it will disappear in the future, but a great game, platform, and most importantly, an active community, could go a very long way in supporting more widespread adoption.

Arduino – EDUC 342: Child Development & New Technologies

Week 4: Fröbel’s Forgotten Gift