the Design Experience Weblog Archive

From http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html:

One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

That's me.

So, I actually bought a Leapster for my 5-year-old for Christmas. It went over very well. He had seen it before, so he had an idea what it was. It is very easy for him to control. It didn't require any reading of the manuals to get going. The games are just about exactly right for a curious child of kindergarten age. It is very well built with an included cover for the LCD display.

We also have PCs, a Gamecube, and a Playstation 2, so there is some competition. He definitely will choose the Leapster and play with it for an extended time. I am sure it will be handy on long car trips.

He did find some annoyances. One, sometimes you need to use the direction pad, other times the attached stylus. There doesn't seem to be much logic in which you have to use, although frequently you can use the other input option even though the recorded voice insists on one.

The next issue is that in the bundled cartride, there is a small drawing game where you can color in some pictures or create your own. It doens't seem to save them at all. He has previously doodled on my Treo 90 and knows that it does save your pictures, so he found that to be disappointing. I would think there would be some onboard static RAM in the Leapster or in the cartridges for this kind of saving. It does appear to save game progress for up to 4 players.

So, It seems it was a good investment. At little more than a Pixter Color, with much better display. It doesn't have as many free-form activities as the Pixter, but I am pretty sure my son has used the Leapster almost as much as the Pixter he got last year. I think there is definitly room for even more interesting devices of this type for kids.

I am still disappointed that it is not programmable, but I have plenty of PCs around the house for that type of activity.

Thanks to Duncan Smeed for some great links I had not seen. Seymour Papert on Project Based Learning, and The Maine Event over at Edutopia Online (George Lucas Education Foundation Web Site) where the tagline reads "envision the future of pubic education."

In the Papert interview he says "Well, first thing you have to do is to give up the idea of curriculum. Curriculum meaning you have to learn this on a given day. Replace it by a system where you learn this where you need it." This really interested me because my five-year-old has come home in the last week or two pointing at different things around the house says "that's a sphere", "this is a rectangular prism." I was quite surpised. I don't know if I ever was taught the concept of retangular prism ever. I asked him why he needed to learn all these things and he replied (not an exact quote, but close enough) "when I am a bigger kid and I want to do some science stuff" which is cute, but I am still not sure what to think. Generally I agree that learning when you really need something is better than learning a list of facts that might be useful someday. For now I will just wait and see. If this in kindergarten I wonder what first grade is like. See also: Do they need to know it? Do they need to know it now? for another take on the subject.


On the Maine Laptop program, it looks like it has been a great success. Unfortunately it looks like the legislature and governor are not sure they want to continue the success. No guarantee of funding for laptops is grades after 7 is made. It looks like the schools really got behind the idea of letting the kids get more involved with their learning. I read about a laptop program in another state that was not very successful. I hope that the problems can be worked out. I really belive that this is one way to get kids more involved in their learning. The writing in that article is good, with plenty of links to further reading.

I found an interesting article describing StarLogo: "StarLogo is a fun (and free!) present to give your kids. The true gift is one of learning and sharing the learning experience with them." Wow. StarLogo sounds like a great way to teach programming to kids. StarLogo is free to download.

In addition I just learned about Computer Science Logo Style, a three volume set of computer science fundamentals using Logo as the foundation.

The StarLogo folks also have a new book called Adventures in Modeling.

Thanks to Lambda The Ultimate.

There is also TinyLogo for PalmOS.

From Boing Boing:

The University of Maine has launched "Still Water," a copyright-free zone for posting and sharing images, music, videos, programming code and texts.

Thames and Kosmos has some very interesting science kits including a fuel cell powered car.

NY Times Magzine has an essay about the lack of information in the average Powerpoint presentation. It refers to Edward Tufte's report The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. A Microsoft rep responds to Tufte's criticism of the low information density of presentations by saying that presentation viewers would be bored by more information. This just makes it clear that people should not make decisions based on a few bullet points. My favorite part "Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it"

The Leapster handheld from LeapFrog is a neat little platform. I was wondering if it could be programmed. I just remembered that the other LeapFrog products such as LeapPad can download software onto a catridge using the Mind Station connected to a PC and the internet. More investigation would be needed, but I suspect it might not be totally impossible to add software to the Leapster.

UPDATE: Darn. The Leapster cartridges are decidedly not plug compatible with other LeapFrog products. Probably on purpose because the underlying system is so different. Oh well, it would still be great to have downloadable content with an accessory similar to the Mind Station.

Over at Water Cooler Games is a post that referecnes my idea to put Squeak in a Handheld device for kids. It mentions such a device could promote procedural literacy. Now I need to find out what procedural literacy is.

Aha, very simply procedural literacy is the knowledge of how procedural thinking works. A good quote of a quote:

But the real revolutionary was Ken Perlin, Director of the NYU Media Research Laboratory. In a breathtakingly dense five minutes, he critiqued the culture of passivity and argued for universal procedural literacy to combat it. Citizens who can *make* things, he said, would understand that they can affect the world; if we institute programming languages as part of the general education of all, we will be helping to guide a revolution in the way people think and act. Imagine if a child knew how procedural thinking worked - imagine if programming became like writing, like literacy, not a technical skill learned by engineers, but a fundamental language of self-expression naturally used by writers, artists, musicians, anyone. Way beyond open source, it was a manifesto for democratizing access to cultural participation at the most basic level. I felt like giving him a standing ovation. [from game girl advance]

Very interesting. I need to think about it.

Water Cooler Games has a good review of the Leapster. It has some good comments of the limits of learning and gaming that are present in the software offered by LeapFrog.