Brian Jordan
Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:15:19 -0700
On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Seth Woodworth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How do you feel about providing coloring books like activities in sugar? > I've found material from the American Red Cross on Disaster Preparedness in > around 20 languages[1]. I feel that it would be fairly trivial work to > create a template for children to color in in another activity (hopefully > the wonderful painting activity from ICDL). Is this work worth doing?
Simple to do, and it seems the appeal is that it would make getting used to the touchpad/whatever-input-method-works-in-this-imaginary-scenario a palatable process for veryveryyoungkids while displaying useful information. I say get it done and make it available--but consider simply adding image overlay capability to Colors[1]. It can already overlay a snapshot from the video camera, so holding up any picture/piece of nature/drawing to the camera can accomplish a similar (and more open ended) feat. This is One More Thing that would be a lot simpler and extensible with a more flexible journal/datastore (meaning storing Pictures, Audio, Video, Data [csv files], etc in a way that can be shared between activities). It seems to my uninformed self that, presently, the activities are constraining the output. (Disclaimer: I haven't gotten that deep into journal/datastore programming yet). I copy Eben... a couple sentences on where thought on this is headed? (there's also a video I took of discussion this... I'll forward when I find it) > Is a coloring book an effective method of distributing information in a > digital realm? One interpretation is that it is a passive way of learning to fill in shapes that have been handed to the child (and those shapes may be artfully arranged to display informative pictures like in comic books). > Is it a constructionist method or how could it be made one? Disclaimer: I have read little on constructionism. In fact, I'm not positive that I used the word constructionism properly in that last sentence. Consider the utility of coloring books. It is to "provide a colorless guide to draw with a colored medium in and around". (1) The child has a choice of color for each segment. (unless there are letters like R, G, etc in the segments) (2) The child may choose (/struggle) to which extent they color "inside the lines" Yes, in (1), there is some freedom (the number of segments ^ the number of colors), but it is constrained. How can we take the benefits of coloring books and make them a tool... a hammer. Make it versatile -- so the child can choose what to over/underlay on their painting. They can choose a graph they made earlier that day. Or a grid for drafting a design of their house. Or some Red Cross pamphlets on the school server. Or a picture of a cat they found on Google Images (find edges, anyone?). That's utility. That's something I'd like to have to play with right now. :) Cheers, night, Brian > > Seth > > [1] http://www.redcross.org/services/disaster/0,1082,0_504_,00.html > > _______________________________________________ > Its.an.education.project mailing list > Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org > http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project > > _______________________________________________ Its.an.education.project mailing list Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project