connect. create. question.

I’ve recently been reading quite a bit about games in education. The ECT program at Steinhardt has an entire course on games, and I have to admit I’m not all that keen on them (simulations are, in my mind, a different but related genre, by the way). It’s not because I don’t think they have value; I absolutely do. And it’s not because I dislike playing them; while I would never colour myself with the Gaming Crayon, I definitely like to play, but rarely for extended periods. After an hour I tend to lose interest, and I’m not sure why. However, I will admit to having spent more than my fair share with the Nintendo Wii (which I specifically did not buy because I knew I would never study), and my all-time game definitely has to be Tetris. I’m also a big fan of the classic ’80s Atari games like E.T., Frogger, and PacMan. I like playing games more with other people than by myself, and I definitely see their social value. Many of the articles I’ve been reading for Frank’s class have lauded educational games because of their problem-solving features, their adept story-telling and story-weaving, their promotion of positive emotions, and many other features that help explain, on a cognitive psychological level, why games help foster learning. And I understand that games can be totally, wildly fun and involving and still teach. I get all of this, and for the most part, I agree with it.

If you had asked me a few weeks ago why I don’t think games will be big in schools, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you why. I simply haven’t been able to articulate the reason why I don’t think they will ever really be incorporated and integrated into schools.

Until now.

I read this article by Constance Steinkuehler at the University of Madison-Wisconsin and Dmitri Williams at the University of Illinois: “Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as ‘Third Places’.” (BTW, you can see the article with my highlights and annotations via Diigo here, in case you are interested.) The article is about how online games, in a social-networking kind of way, provide “Third Places” for users to hang out, share, explore, and learn. I totally agree with this comparison. The article goes into depths comparing various games and users to the definition of Third Places as defined by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community.

The epiphany happened for me when I read this quote (emphasis mine):

First and foremost, third places are defined as neutral grounds where individuals can enter and leave as they see fit without having to ask permission or receive an invitation (as one might in a private space) and without having to “play host” for anyone else. Compare, for example, weekday attendance at the workplace to happy hour attendance at the neighborhood tavern. The former is a second place, marked by financial obligation and rules that structure who is expected to be where and for how long; the latter is a third place, marked by relative freedom of movement. [. . . ] To oblige any one person to play requires that explicit agreements be entered into by parties (much like making arrangements for a recreational team sport), since the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise. Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency “farmer” for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in.

Do As I Say by Viewmaker
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

And then it hit me: I think this is why we will never see games take off in current schools. The game cannot be the Third Place because school is a Second Place. Students are required to be there, required to participate, and marked by rules that structure it.

So, it’s my current belief that until schools are reformed into neutral grounds marked by relative freedom of movement, we’re not likely to see games become something big within them.

We’ve been asked to critique the Sesame Workshop’s Panwapa site, a “global awareness curriculum site” for 4- to 7-year-olds, according to Sesame’s press page. 

When you first arrive on the site, one of the characters instructs you to click the globe to explore, and so I did. This led me to a place where I could create my own Panwapa kid, apparently. I did not know what this meant, but I signed up anyway. I created my own Panwapa kid and my own house, too. Both were pretty-customizable. However, even a 7-year-old would have had difficulty with all the choices, and most certainly would need guidance from an adult while doing this. (It turns out this thought would reappear throughout my short Panwapa experience.) I also was struck with the thought of how many of the customizable items — food, crafts, and clothing, for example — were rather stereotypical. And I further wondered about the value of these stereotypes in an interactive game for pre-schoolers. Do we want all 4-year-olds to think that everyone in Asia eats only rice? Perhaps I’m over-simplifying, but it is worth considering.

After creating my own Panwapa kid, I was shown the map of all other Panwapa kids. I did a bit of exploring, but that got boring really quickly and so I decided to click the “Treasure Hunt” button. This invited me to a game where I had to find other Panwapa kids who liked certain things. There were three rounds:

1. Find a Panwapa kid who likes traditional American dolls.
2. Find a Panwapa kid who likes sharks and ice cream.
3. Find a Panwapa kid who likes sharks, ice cream, and tennis.

For each level, I had to click through many (like, more than 10) kids to see if they were a “match.” I am not sure if there was an easier way to do it, but I did so by clicking on the “Activities” and “food” buttons, and then scrolling through the kids to see what they liked. It took some time, and wasn’t all that engaging, except that I was praised by the character every time I got something correct, which was kinda nice. And at the end of it all, I got a Panwapa card for my collection. It wasn’t clear to me, however, what I could do with that card later.

I also viewed the movie game, as per Frank’s request (clicking on the little bug’s film projector). This was so confusing to me. I did not realize until the end of the film that the goal of the film was to garner appreciation for learning another language, and going to school. I thought, as I was watching, that the film was more about the marginalization of the Maasai people in Tanzania. After all, Moses says, “We are not allowed to speak our language in school” and he talks about how learning this second language was hard, but it got easier. Yet, the little bug character at the end says something to the effect of, “Did you see that? Moses learned another language to teach his community!” as if this is the coolest thing since sliced bread. What I was thinking was that obviously Moses was sent to school as a fortunate one in his village — I doubt all kids in Tanzania are going to school, especially minorities like the Maasai. And he was probably sent because he is a male, and there was probably an expectation for him to teach his community because he is probably one of only a few in the village who get to go to school.

At the end of the film, the “game” begins: watch the film again and whenever you hear Moses speak Swahili, click on the Panwapa button. What??? I gave it a shot. Apparently he does this 4 times, but I only heard / saw 3. And I am an adult who speaks 4 languages! How on earth would a 4-year-old be able to get that? If the goal of this section was to teach appreciation for other languages, I definitely think it could have been done differently.  Further, I wonder if this “appreciation” lesson is age-appropriate for 4- to 7-year-olds.

It was not until after I played these games and clicked around did I find out what Sesame Workshop’s goals were for this site, and I have to say I was really surprised. Apparently Panwapa is meant to :

[help] children gain empathy for others while encouraging a broader international perspective.

You can read more detailed information about Panwapa’s educational framework here [pdf].

Frank asks, “Does it hit the mark?” My answer, as an educator: No.

It does, however, do a few things well. I identified the following problem-solving features in my brief (20 minute) exploration:

• question posing (these were peppered throughout the treasure hunt)
• identifying relationships (implicit in the treasure hunt)
• gathering information (definitely actively used in the treasure hunt)
• interpreting data (at the end of the film there is a graph provided about where other Panwapa kids go to school)
• scanning for clues (in the film game)
• ability to explore (this is huge, especially on the home page — and it should be, as almost all learning for this age group should be exploratory, in my opinion)
• identification of pattern and sequence (in the film game)
• choices – multiple answers (in the question at the end of the film game)

Other things it does well: in terms of affordances of the interactive technology — this is quite good. It was almost always clear as to what the interactive features do. E.g. if I click on the globe I will go to a map; if I hover my mouse over a character, he will speak; etc. In this sense, I did not find it difficult to navigate. However, I am not sure I could say the same for a 4- to 7-year old. In particular, I wonder about the home page, as there is so much to look at and click on. I wonder if it is too much for a wee person of that age; it could be overwhelming and end up being disjunct with no lessons learned at all.

I guess I’m not saying that Panwapa is a total failure, but no, it does not hit the mark.

If I Had Something to Say by re_birf
Attribution License

This week we’ve been asked to jot down / sketch / brainstorm some ideas about our final design project. I was pretty stumped for a while, and I’m still not sure I’ve really got any ideas. I have several jotted down in my (paper) notebook and have been letting them “sit” in my mind for the last 4 or 5 days. Generally they all come back to writing and how to make it more of a social, interactive experience. Basically, I am uncomfortable (always have been) with the stereotypical image of “writer in solitude.” While I agree that at times one can write better when sitting alone, I also think good writers can emerge from a supported community. It takes some balance. I’m not really keen on teaching / instructing people how to become better writers in solitude. I’ll leave that for Sark, Natalie Goldberg, and Julia Cameron. I’m much more interested in how to capitalize on the hive mind and create some solid pieces of Writing For The People.

i am by Will Lion
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

Robert Scoble tried a variation of this using FriendFeed and Twitter, but I am much more interested in the idea of having some kind of platform that makes this all possible — that your audience can give you feedback as the ideas are being generated, and that parts of the writer’s words can be shared, and critiqued, before the piece is “finished.” Or perhaps the piece is never finished? I’d like there to be some element of audio / video, as well, so that users can comment this way and so that the focus is not entirely text-based. I basically want writing — that is, communicating via text — to not be as laborious and text-heavy as it is now. In order to blog these days, you have to be pretty text literate. And while that is fine for those of us who are verbal and educated, what about twelve-year-olds who have something to put out into the world, who want to refine their writing, but want some help and interaction to make their writing really phenomenal?

Perhaps I’m thinking too grandiose at the moment…

What’s been sticking out to me when reading Saffer, Sharp, Norman, and Adams is how important it is for the affordances of the interface to be almost instinctual, or intuitive. I also am intrigued by the feedback/ feed-forward ideas Saffer discusses in Chapter 7; it is striking to me how few programs / platforms incorporate this. The key, I guess, is to have everything seem simple to the user but in reality the complexity is all hidden from the user. Which has got me thinking — if it is intuitive to me, how will I know it is intuitive to others? Saffer in particular talks about how so many designers design things for other designers, and how this is just not cool. I have to agree. So I am wondering — hoping? optimistically? naively? — that not being a designer myself or having that background will actually be an advantage in this particular project. Or is that what every designer thinks when they first start out… ? I suppose it comes back to what we’ve been learning in every course so far — a tenet that is fundamental to educators in general — know your user. Do research, talk to them, study them, find out how they will use things, how they think. This reminds me also how intrigued I was about all the user research that went into Quest Atlantis, having read about this for a different course. Knowing your user is key, and I suppose one cannot assume ever that they are just like oneself!

I have to admit that I’m really also loving the ideas of one of my classmates, Poukhan. Check out her ideas. I am tempted to scrap my interactive writing idea altogether and ask if I can join her!

This week’s Design Journal assignment required us, among other things, to write a 55-word story, in the spirit of  55 Fiction. Frank didn’t say so directly, but I imagine this has something to do with the importance of story-telling in design. And what better way to understand the important elements of a story than to whittle it down to its bare-bones elements. It reminds me a little bit of Angry Alien Productions’ 30-Second Bunnies, in that only the basics remain, and yet the story still functions. Here is my first ever 55-word story.

Dead Giveaway

Dark-Field Lighting 2 by Kyle May
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“Sweetheart,” he gushes.

“Whiskey, darling?”

“Always.”

The waiter pauses.

“Jameson. On rocks, for him.” Sipping wine, she fumbles in her purse.

Pocket vibration. “Sweetheart, I’ve gotta. . . Hello?” He rises. Impatient ice melts into Jameson; she fumbles in her purse.

Only after paramedics remove the motionless body, the waiter remembers crimson nails, fumbling in her purse.

Teachers — myself included — are always telling their students that they should connect their learning to themselves, to something the student feels passionate about. We know that this principle is largely based upon constructivist learning theories. It’s no secret that I am generally a constructivist (though I spice things up with aspects from other theories too), so I am taking a constructivist approach to my assignment this week. This week, I’ve been assigned to critique an interface, based on the readings I’ve been doing about design. Frank said we could critique pretty much anything that is an “everyday object” or even wider, to a kiosk or web page. I’m choosing something near and dear to my heart: a coffee travel mug.

If you know me well, you know I have a substantial collection of coffee mugs in my ownership. I don’t collect them for any reason other than because I love to drink coffee, and I love that travel mugs make the drinking of coffee so wonderfully convenient. The mug I’m critiquing today is this one (Fig.1):

Fig. 1

Overview:

Fig. 2

This travel mug is a standard 12oz. (”tall”) sized mug made by Starbucks. It has a rubber bottom approximately two inches wide, and is approximately 8 inches tall. The base of the lid is about 3 inches in diameter, meaning it has a larger lid than base. (See Fig. 2) The mug’s exterior is made of hard, clear plastic, while the lid is made up of rigid burgundy plastic. Inside the lid, there is a rubber ring around the diameter of the lid where it screws onto the main part of the mug. (See Fig. 3) The lid screws on inside of the mug itself. The lid also has a flip-top with a “lip” made of rubber, a different material than the plastic which makes up the rest of the lid. The rubber on the “lip” is meant to completely close the hole in the top of the lid which would normally be used to drink from. In effect, closing the “lip” seals the container, though Starbucks is quick to point out in the material that comes with their products that they do NOT guarantee their mugs to be spill- or leak-proof.

Mapping:

The mapping of this object is fairly obvious in some places, but less explicit in others. For example. It is obvious where one should put his/her mouth — over the hole in the lid. Likewise, it is also obvious that to control the fluid entering / exiting the container, one needs to move the lid. It’s not well mapped as to where one is supposed to hold the mug, so I assume one is meant to hold it however necessary to get the liquid out of the container and into one’s mouth, which I believe would be the goal (well, it is in my case, anyway!). Thus, experimentation is again needed to tilt, hold, grip, and rotate the mug itself. This is not explicitly mapped, though I have a hard time imagining anyone would find difficulty with it, assuming they have some prior experience with a drinking container of some kind. In that sense, it is intuitive, but it is not mapped.

Fig. 3

Affordance:

If affordance is about giving the user an idea or clue of how to use something, then I will say it is less obvious how to “unlock” the lid when it is snapped shut over the lip. The lip protrudes over the edge of the lid, so it is implied that one has to use his /her fingers to pop it open, but there are no directional instructions (words, symbols).  Also much less obvious is how to open the lid. There are no arrows or other visual indicators to show how or which way to get the lid off of the main mug. It is only by experimentation or trial and error that one learns that it screws off, in the “standard” way (”righty-tighty, lefty-loosey”). Regarding affordance of what to do with the entire object: while it is intuitive as to what to do with this object, I might say that it has affordance in this respect (ie., it looks like something you are supposed to drink out of). However, as I stated earlier, this is not necessarily well-mapped and relies on the user’s previous experience / knowledge. One who did not have any experience with previous travel mugs, for example, might think that the main mug part of the object could be used as a vase, or a pencil holder. Thus, the design of the product itself does not have any affordances made to make it explicitly clear that this object is solely for drinking coffee.

Function and Feedback:

Considering what the product has been designed for, I think it achieves its purpose in a basic but adequate way. It holds coffee. The lid closes and thus it is relatively good at keeping the coffee inside when it is not being consumed. However, the function of stability is not as well accounted-for as it could be. Because the base is approximately 1 inch smaller in diameter than the top, the mug is not especially stable. This means it is easy to knock over, tip, or not set down properly, which could lead to the tragedy of spilled coffee. Even if the mug lip is closed over the lid, some does leak out if the mug is completely turned on its side. This is despite the design including a rubber ring around the lid and the rubber “stopper” in the lip. Additionally, the container is not insulated and so coffee does not stay warm for long. I might also add that the design is not compatible for rugged lifestyles, as when dropped, the item does crack.  (See Fig. 4) This is despite the very firm and heavy plastic used to create the product.

Fig. 4

Conclusion: Is this well-designed?

The interface for this mug is fairly well-designed, but it could be better. More specifically, I think this kind of object could be more ergonomically designed to fit neatly in a person’s hand (mapping). Also, I think more affordances could be made in terms of how to unscrew the lid and how to open the lip of the lid. Lastly, I think the design could be improved by widening the bottom of the base. This would prevent more accidents in terms of spillage, which could potentially be dangerous if the liquid inside is very hot.

Last thoughts:

Hmmm, I wonder if hypothetically Starbucks could ever be sued for poor design if the mug tipped over after one had just poured very hot coffee inside and the lip was open because I couldn’t figure out how to close it properly, or the lid not screwed on completely tight?

I’m kidding, of course, but it is food for thought, isn’t it? Is it my fault that the coffee mug is not designed for stability? or that I can’t figure out how to get the lid off?

What implications does design have for things like regular instructional planning and strategies? What about the design of a teacher’s classroom — how the desks are arranged, how the furniture is set up, where the whiteboard or projector screen is? What affordances are you providing for your students? How well-mapped is your project handout?

I have never thought about design in these ways before, but it certainly has got me thinking about larger implications. I’m even now thinking about how I can “re-design” my living space!

Photos are all mine.