Introduction

Walk into any kindergarten class and you are sure to find some familiar objects scattered around the room. You might see building blocks, Cuisenaire Rods, and many other manipulatives that have made their way into early childhood education curriculums across the globe. However, as you travel through the upper grades, the use of manipulatives starts fading in exchange for formal learning. By taking a detailed look at the affordances and unique characteristics that traditional manipulatives offer, we begin to uncover limitations that may account for the potential drop off in upper grade classrooms, when knowledge become more dynamic. By understanding and identifying these limitations, researchers have been able to introduce some advantages that computation and digitally enhanced communication could offer this media environment. Digital manipulatives, as they are called, contain embed computational and communication hardware inside physical objects. (Resnick, Martin, Berg, Borovy, Colella, Kramer, Silverman, 1998 ) This collaboration serves to decrease the limitations that traditional manipulatives have, while increasing the control and applicable usage of static objects, such as manipulatives, in an educational environment.

Timeline of Manipulatives

Manipulatives have a long history, spanning back over a century. Listed bellow are two notable advocates for manipulatives throughout history.

In 1837, Friedrich Froebel created the first kindergarten. Founded on the belief that early childhood education should be based on natural play, he developed “Froebel’s Gifts” to encourage the development of construction and symbolism. Providing children with a collection of extremely simple abstract playthings, encouraged them to combine objects to construct more complex forms (Wilson, 238).

Maria Montessori later expanded on Froebel’s ideas, by stating that the goal of education is “to find activities that are so intrinsically meaningful that we want to throw ourselves into them” (Montessori, 1967). Dr. Montessori believed that deep concentration was essential for developing a learners knowledge. This deep concentration comes about through children working with their hands. As a result, Montessori incorporated a new generation of manipulative materials that put children in control of the learning process. (Lillard, 2008)

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I read the article, Educational Games Don’t Have to Stink! and wanted to speak to some of his comments.

The author makes claims that “They [computers assisted instruction] generally teach in a linear, inflexible way. They cannot think up new analogies to help convey an idea to a student.” What he is describing here could be challenged by looking at Artificial Intelligence and adaptive learning software. This alternative allows a learning solution to compare a learners progression in the game/software to a student/expert model. Although it may be a challenge to calibrate your model correctly, it is far from a linear inflexible solution.

As for his statement that technology does not offer charisma. I would refute this by stating that not “all” teachers are charismatic, nor is all instructional media engaging, which to me makes this a generalization. As for technology not offering “attention”, that would really depend on how the technology is programmed. Computers do sit and wait for input as he stated, but then they could “process that input” and compare that input with an expert/student knowledge base, or the learner’s prior history with similar problems. Once the application identifies a discrepancy, then it could “output” specific scaffolding (hinting), feedback, etc. to speak to the learners difficulties, or offer an alternative method of displaying the problem through the use of multiple modalities.

The author also states that trial and error is a bad thing. Good thing he isn’t a scientist, failure is the backbone of innovation. Not allowing children to fail is robbing them of their creativity. Games and simulations create a safe non threatening place to try, fail and explore new solutions to problems. The issue I think the author is trying to uncover is one that i also agree with, education game designers should really look to designing games around the content that is to be learned, not designing the content around the game play.

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I decided to finally take a test drive of XtraNormal. I saw this site a while back, but never got around to using it. Bellow is a quick video that took less then 5 minutes to produce. This includes writing the script, setting up camera angles, and adding some background music.

I figured I would share since it is a pretty impressive demonstration of development, interaction and most of all I could see it being very useful for teachers to use in their classrooms. Let me know what you think.

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I was ecstatic to be one of the first people to have the opportunity to test run Google Wave. Unfortunately, there is only so much i could do in a collaborative environment that has no one in my contacts list. Hopefully this will change soon, and Google will accept some of the people that I invited so i could run some more “real life” application scenarios. Up till now I sort of feel like I was invited to a party that not nobody has shown up too yet, so i have nobody to talk too

Off the bat, as soon as i launched Google Wave, it was pretty apparent that there was going to be some getting used to. I had a similar reaction when i started my own wiki, and had no idea where to start once it was up and running. I regularly use emails, various collaboration software, cloud computing web apps, and maintain my own wiki. I am typically pretty comfortable in most web environments, however most web environments serve a limited purpose, and it is rather easy to see if the function that the application is going to help accomplish is a fits your needs. Google Wave however seems a little tougher to try to classify. I could imagine people using this system for a lot of very different task. It seems as though it will be a pretty flexible solution once you get through the initial hump of identifying the need the need it will serve. This will probably be the toughest part for some users, but I am sure Google will do their best of advertising different reasons to use the web application.

I won’t really speak on the technical issues that I had, since it is only in a preview state & I was expecting some hiccups. However for the most part it seemed pretty stable. At first glance Google has decided to keep a very similar aesthetic design style that you would find in Gmail, which seemed comforting and easy to get acquainted. There where some vocabulary changes that i did see. Gmail allows you to create filters for email by creating “Labels”. You could accomplish a similar thing on Wave, by creating Read more

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This was a great talk by Dan Saffer, principal designer at Kicker Studio and author of Designing Gestural Interfaces: Touchscreens and Interactive Devices. I felt reminiscent of the work i did with multitouch. So many of the factors he brought up make so much sense.

The first issue I ran into “How do you prototype multitouch with out a huge budget”? Initially we wanted large projection with collaborative gestures, much like you would see at a museum, or a Microsoft Surface. Unfortunetly my partner and where pretty broke so the only options where:
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