I recently bought my six month old daughter some toy blocks. I’ve been awestruck watching her develop her problem solving abilities with these simple blocks. Although her problem may only be “how do i get this block in mouth?”, she has learned to manipulate her environment to achieve her goal. This all falls in line with the Sensory-Motor Stage of Piaget’s Theory of Intellectual Development (birth-2yrs).

Manipulatives are objects that students use to support hands-on learning. By manipulating these objects, students are able to develop their understanding of abstract concepts and problem solving skills. However, what I fail to completely understand, is why do manipulatives fade as students further their education? When students enter kindergarten, they are engulfed in these types of learning activities, yet when they reach higher levels of education, and concept become much more abstract, the pile of block quickly get substituted with a pile of books. Both books and screens (computer LCD, TV) are 2 dimensional planes which do their best to represent a 3 dimensional world. This is not in any way taking away from what books and computer programs have to offer, however I feel manipulatives could scaffold their learning process and help students create a more authentic learning experience from which they could make connections to their 2 dimensional counter parts.
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ESL (English as a Second Language) students come from a variety of cultural, physical, social, and educational backgrounds. The process of second language learning can be very stressful, and the impact of positive or negative attitudes from the surrounding society can be critical. ESL high-school students are also faced with the realization that learning the language is necessary to their future success in school, and ultimately their career path. To make matters worse, ESL instructors often use methods and materials that have been developed with the learning needs of native English speakers in mind. As a result, frustration and failure may lead to higher than average drop-out rates among immigrant students in high school.

The goal of an ESL program is too assist students in becoming proficient in English, and to be successful active participants within a classroom. They should be able to express a range of critical perspectives and enter quick paced interactions. Based on this goal, it seems that group communication should be a large focus of their learning. Indeed, recent studies in ESL have revealed the importance of the social context in which the second language is learned, and the relationships that are fostered. Through this perspective, the act of learning a second language, becomes a situated activity within a community. By ignoring the situated nature of cognition, education defeats its own goal of providing meaningful knowledge. This contrasts with many classroom learning activities which involve knowledge that is abstract and out of context.
Multi-User Domains

Computer technologies offer an interesting approach to situating knowledge especially in the areas of game development. Within Multi-User Domains (MUDs) players enter virtual worlds as newcomers and gradually gain experience, through Legitimate Peripheral Participation, and eventually become central members of the community. This goes in-line with Lave’s description of Situated Learning, and fosters the formation of cognitive apprenticeships within the community.

Additionally, when situated in a game, this community is part of what Salen and Zimmerman call the ‘magic circle’. The magic circle is the idea that games are situated in a special time and place, outside of the real world. In order for a player to be a part of this magic circle they must first agree to all the rules and limitation set forth by the game designer. This frame is what allows MUDs to be a viable alternative for meaningful authentic environments for knowledge to be situated and communal relationships to be established.

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Today i decided to take trip to my wife’s school in Newark, NJ to see how Pre-K children liked the How Tall Prototype. Overall i got some pretty positive responses.  Bellow is a video of one of the children interacting with the game.  Unfortunately, i think most of the kids where distracted with the webcam video. When i do a more formal test I may use a handheld camera instead.  I think they where also a little shy with me in the room, so next time i may just have my wife run the test since they know her and may be more comfortable being expressive without a stranger in the room.

The video reveals something that should be noted. There was the success in using the response queues through the audio. If you look at the students mouth you could see her counting along, which assists in giving the child a more active role in learning.  It is hard to gauge the success of the the use of Wiimote, but I may looking into doing an engagement analysis another day.

How Tall Test from Alex Britez on Vimeo.

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Jumped back on the the LED experiment tonight. This time i extended the events of the 3D object to handle single and multiple LED detection events.  If the 3D object only detects a single cursor then it only rotates the axis of the object being clicks. If it detects multiple cursors then it rotates the entire environment.

Eventually i think i will make this a multiuser molecule docking simulation, but for now i am just gonna consintrate on getting a decent prototype. This weekend I am gonna extend the events to the smaller objects so i could collaborate with another player, and eventually match poloraties of the molecules.  Should be pretty interesting once it is functional.

I could think of many different types of applications for this type of navigation. However, there are also many environmental issues, such as interference from objects with bright highlights such as metal, or direct light. One option that may solve that is using infrared LED’s instead and cover the webcam lens with a filter to be able to see the infrared.

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Originally, i was going to build some accelerometer hardware to capture motion, but I’ve been tremendously busy.  Instead, I decided to take a stab at checking out some of the open source AS Wii libraries (Google Code).  The game itself is nothing to write home to mom, but I am interested in possibly researching the advantages of leveraging advanced inputs such as the WiiMote to better engage children. I think i may extend this game a bit more, and run a controlled group of children playing my game with the WiiMote, and children playing a similar game with the mouse.  Not sure if this would influence any additional knowledge transfer, but may influence children to play longer and more repetitive, which in turn may have some effect.  More on this topic when i totally wrap my head around the idea.

Wii How Tall from Alex Britez on Vimeo.

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I just started my second semester of graduate school this week, and all of my professor at NYU thus far have brought up using wikis to hand in assignments. Wiki’s are an excellent source for knowledge management in the classroom, especially when you have multiple classes on varying topics. With all the new topics discussed in my classes, it is pretty easy for students to get overloaded with information. I’ve decided to extended my use of wikis to the workplace now, and am in the process of porting over a lot of my code that i reuse like proxies, and that dreaded crossdomain.xml .

I’ve also noticed a lot of professors use of Power Point to to narrate the class discussion. So being that I worked on empressr (a web-based slideshow presentation application), and now use my wiki constantly it only made sense to merge the both. Plus i couldn’t possibly get myself to use some other app asides from the one that I worked on.

The project could be found here unthink media Wiki and could be found on googlecode if anyone is interested in joining the project. Google code SVN repository

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