Samanunga

My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day.

He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.

When I saw it for the first time, its colour also struck me. Nowadays gadgets come in a rainbow of colours but this was only one shade – a bland grey.(…)

When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

full article @ news.bbc.co.uk

The NPR, the National Public Radio (USA), asked their audience about what children do with technology. The responses gave a nice overview of the current momentum of technology in the life of the very young.

“We saw a bit of trend in your stories: cell phones + water = gadget death. A surprising number of variations on that theme involved toilets, pet water bowls and kid drool. Still a whole other category involved stories of repeated 911 dialing, hiding tech toys from stressed parents and inserting all sorts of food into drives and slots of all kinds.

But not all stories involved destruction or police knocking at the door. Below are some of the standouts (…)”

Submitted through Twitter:

• 4 year old learned to type his name on my first blackberry
• Last night my daughter used my cell phone as a flash light in bed after lights out.
• …etc – more in the original article

full article @ npr.org

Now we’re talking UX-research. Children in “Voorburg” received an internet-only iPhone to test a mobile educational site. The site WRTS is designed to help learning words. The launched a mobile version of the site, which is now tested with the iPhone.

One glitch already frustrates the young users: the iPhone “corrects” the entries by capitalizing the first word – while the wrts ís case sensitive. Typing “free iPhone” results in submitting “Free iPhone”, which results in “WRONG – the correct answer is: free iPhone”!

ARGH!

Read the full article @ tweakers.net

Any kid who’s ever been intrigued with Google’s playful holiday logo-decorating antics can now get in the act–with the potential for winning lots of loot for the best efforts.

read full article @ www.fastcompany.com

Research conducted at Harvard University shows that the dangers of internet for young children are highly overrated. Protectionists convey the message that as soon as a child gets online, it cannot escape a tsunami of pornesque pictures and proposals. However, the risk of being solicited through social sites does not differ much from the risk factor IRL, according the research.

In fact, the biggest threat for children is their own misbehaviour in online bullying.

original article @ new york times

2 recommended events this week on design and children:

Fun and Games Conference (www.fng2008.org)
20-22 October 2008
University of Technology, Eindhoven

Cinekid Festival (www.cinekid.nl)
The International film, television and new media festival for children and young people
Especially the New Media Lab in the “Westergasfabriek” is recommended!
11-26 October 2008
Westergasfabriek Amsterdam
and at local Cinema’s

Outdoctrination, I am outdoctrinated, you are outdoctrinated? Children behave beyond the descriptive power of science in Sugata Mitra: Can kids teach themselves?, an inspiring and revealing talk at the LIFT conference 2007 in Geneva.

Sugata Mitra worked on the “internet in a wall” experiment. Take a monitor, put it in a hole in the wall and provide a mouse. Watch what happens when children start to discover. Repeat all over “demographically-rich” India.

The full presentation takes 21 minutes. If you want to skip the intro and experimental scientific stuff, FFWD to approx 15 minutes in time where he presents his findings. Some high-lights:

• children take about eight minutes to figure out how to browse the internet.
• children teach themselves English to read on the internet
• (in 3 months approx 200 words – all mispronounced but actively used)
• children work consistently in small groups (±4), combining DIY with teaching eachother
• scientifically no external factors seem to correlate with the learning experience and still it happens: how do we go about?

Watch the video at TED.com

The “kid’s stuff session” was interesting, especially the first two presentations:

• Children Attribute Moral Standing to a Personified Agent; and
• Mischief:: Supporting Remote Teaching in Developing Regions

Great work! (more…)

Thanks to a generous sponsor, I suddenly find myself putting my things together for a trip CHI2008! And it’s not even an April Fool’s Joke, thanks a lot!

A great chance to meet the CHICI group again, and hopefully to talk to the kiddesign group of Allison Druin from the university of Maryland. Will attend the kid’s stuff session on monday and two courses: “beyond anecdotes” and “giving children a voice in the design of technology”.

TNO presented the playground of the future at March 11, in De Uithof in The Hague. A whole afternoon of figures and VIPs about what the playground of the future should look like. The conclusions of TNO were in short that the future playground should comply with regulations (yawn), should be more safe for both youngsters and adolescents (hm hm) and they should be more effective(!).
(more…)