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Mar
5
Create365: City Planning
Filed Under content development, education, writing | View Comments
I have this dream of someday pulling together my love of certain media and my passion for teaching to create multimedia math and science lessons. Occasionally, I’ll get an idea for a teaching moment and jot it down.
This one features an NPC who is the assistant to the player/learner’s city planner. She’s trying to help the student plan out space allotment through a percent lesson. It’s not good. It really is just a sketch. But it’s something to launch from.
ASSISTANT
25% of the population will want to live in this area of town. Hmm… How can we figure out how many people that is?Well, “percent” means “for every 100″. So 25 out of every 100 people will want to live there, or 25/100 people. 25/100 is the same as .25. So .25 of [town population] wants to live there.
.25 x [town population] means [answer] people will want to live there.
What about this 12% who will want to live in this other area?
The player/learner then has to figure it out and type in an answer, which will trigger an appropriate response from the assistant.
I wrote it in script form because I haven’t decided yet whether I would present this as text or as narration.
Jan
29
As I pointed out the other day, for all the ways we girls complain about how hard it is to get anywhere because we’re girls, the guys really don’t have it easier. Sure, there are a lot of ways in which society favors guys, but there are also points where guys can (and sometimes do) cry foul.
For example, if a guy is emotionally sensitive (and isn’t funny that we’d call a guy “emotionally sensitive” while we womenfolk are just “sensitive”?), he gets picked on for being weak. If he’s gentle and compassionate, he’s derisively called “effeminate”. And if he aspires to “women’s work”, then his sexuality gets challenged (and if he’s lucky, that’s all that happens to him).
The guys just don’t have it any easier when their actions and dreams lead them in a path not traditionally considered “masculine”, and they have to fight to prove that what they’re doing, the choices they’re making, don’t make them any less of a man. They’re just trying to be who they want to be.
Sound familiar, girls?
And like us girls, guys are getting bad messages from media, too. It’s the tough, strong guy who gets the pretty girl. Or it’s flawless Prince Charming. One of my favorite examples comes from a Lifehack article showing how boy-targeted action figures have changed since I was playing with Star Wars and G.I.Joe action figures. What? Now in order to save the galaxy, you have to look like He-Man? I don’t think so!
Oh, and being a smart guy? You’d better be smart in just the right way, or you’re a nerd looking to get pushed into a wall of lockers…or the wall of the conference room. Whatever’s handy for the resident tough guy.
So, we women have a fight on our hands getting the right to become the people we want to be…but we’re not alone. A lot of guys are right there with us, fighting for their own right to be who they want to be, too.
It’s something to think about…
Jan
21
Hope for princesses
Filed Under character development, content development | View Comments
This morning, I came across some links that fit in nicely with my post from Tuesday.
First, I came across an entertaining video on Target Women about the Disney Princesses. I balk at the inclusion of Mulan, who is not a princess, and I feel that Briar Rose/Aurora’s situation wasn’t well-explained, but other than that, I couldn’t stop laughing. What I did like, and what might have been a sheer accident on Target Women’s part, is that Sarah Haskins does point out how formulaic the Disney movies are.
Hopefully, I’ll have time over the weekend to watch more of the videos.
The other link brings a small ray of hope. In wondering how harmful these princesses are to our little princesses, Eric Steinman included this wonderful quote from Peggy Orenstein:
“there are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs–who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty–are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception.”
So, while little girls love to play princess, it might not be as harmful to their self-image as it could be. That’s great!
Of course, in watching and reading this morning, I started thinking about my own childhood. I loved Disney movies, but Mom made sure I had access to the fairy tales these movies were based on so I didn’t see the world through a Disney Princess filter. I was also an assertive girl from the get-go. I was the princess who ran off into action with everyone else. In fact, it wasn’t until I was an adult in a LARP that I suddenly found myself playing the Damsel in Distress on rare occasions.
I think there’s something to Orenstein’s quote. How the Disney Princesses affect you, what lessons you absorb from them, are dictated to some extent by the kind of girl you already are.
Nov
9
Questioning strategies as game deisgn?
Filed Under content development, education, gaming | View Comments
One of the issues I’ve been struggling with as I try to imagine how I would develop game-inspired educational material is how to incorporate my teaching style into my work. The problem is: I’m a Constructivist with Socratic tendencies.
That first isn’t too big a problem. Sequential story-lessons are easily planned out and created, and mythocentric game design makes a compelling argument for letting story-lessons that don’t rely on each other serve as a “level” that the learner can explore at will before being allowed to move on to the next “level” and building on what they’ve learned in lower “levels”.
The second, however, is a bit more challenging. I tend to direct my students through questions, helping them to make their own connections and to see why they’re doing what they’re doing. When the teacher isn’t present, though, it’s hard to know what sequence of questions to set up to help facilitate that type of learning.
After reading Emily Short’s series on modeling conversation in interactive fiction, I thought I had it somewhat figured out: create a Guide NPC to ask more common or basic questions to guide learner between encounters and to help the learner think through the problem when they’ve made a mistake. The Guide NPC could even go so far as to offer a review if the learner is completely off-topic.
The more I thought about that, the more I felt myself getting turned around because I felt I was making too big an assumption with the basic or common questions. Then, a former student and I gather around a virtual whiteboard to see what was going wrong on a homework assignment, and I found a preliminary answer. As we talked, I found the probing and directing questions I nearly always ask, mainly because she was asking herself those questions with a preface of, “I know you’d ask me…”
The next problem to either resolve or let go is wait time. I use that to help feel out where a student is in understanding what they’re working on, but I can’t exactly give a fictional character that same instinct.
Sep
18
The value of information
Filed Under content development, education, teaching moments | View Comments
There have been quite a few jokes lately on the widespread misinterpretation of the quote, “Information wants to be free.” Call it optimistic hopefulness. Call it brutish ignorance. Call it whatever you will. The simple fact of the matter is that because “free” has multiple definitions, people interpreted it to fit their worldview (perhaps saying something about themselves in the process).
Most of my students haven’t heard this quote, in context or out, but they definitely face the inherent spirit of it on a near-daily basis as they learn about copyright and plagiarism. I’ll never forget the student who, in all seriousness, told me that she could take anything she found on the internet and do whatever she wanted with it because it was “free”. I quickly explained to her that copyright does extend to work on the internet, and it’s only free if it’s specifically labeled public domain. She wasn’t too sure about that, but she was at least willing to consider that I knew what I was talking about.
It’s amazing how many of my students have either not been taught this, or have tuned out the teacher. These students tend to be frustrating because they whine on and on (in a private tutoring center, no less) about how they can’t get to the information they want for a school project because some jerk had the gall to lock it up away from them. They then boast that they can just find that same information somewhere else…and that never works out. They don’t get it. They don’t understand.
What they’re missing, and what I think is a part of what makes copyright protection so nice, is that information doesn’t want to be certain definitions of free. It wants to be unrestrained, but at the same time be respected and valued.
Jul
29
Informal learning doesn’t have to be declared
Filed Under animation, content development, education | View Comments
If I’ve learned one thing from being an animation fan my entire life, it’s that a cartoon doesn’t have to be educational to teach you something. I think it’s important to remember that when debating the “usefulness” of watching cartoons.
This isn’t meant to belittle the educational cartoons, either. I’ve spent many an afternoon watching Arthur and Cyberchase. To this day, the animation/live action-hybrid Blue’s Clues is still a favorite show. They’re all three well-done shows where a learning outcome is clearly displayed, regardless of whether it’s a lesson about friendship, math and science, or exploring the world around you.
The E/I rating (as near as I can tell) helps identify cartoons that aren’t necessarily educational in nature, but fit a certain criteria to be considered “educational enough”. More recent examples of this include Magi-Nation, which offered interesting and relevant moments of math and science instruction interspersed throughout the storyline, and Winx Club, which encourages girls to develop strong, positive characters.
Then you have the cartoons that are either built around a trendy toy or game (card or video). Because they’re really trying to sell something, they get written off. The cartoons are often shorter than cartoons in the educational or E/I categories, and the writing can get downright insipid at times. That said, though, the writers on these cartoons take advantage of the nature of the world they’re writing in to slip in mini-lessons from science and social studies. I can even think of a couple of cartoons that promote literacy simply by having the characters read frequently. My favorite cartoons tend to fall into this last group, and I can’t tell you how many things I learned from those cartoons in the 80’s are still with me now as an adult.
Just because something isn’t “educational” doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from it.
Jul
8
The perils of not researching before you start writing
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The following is currently on my whiteboard: An Underworld temple sacred space marked by a hill or stone circle would probably make more sense. And I put it there after reacquainting myself with English archaeology and folklore, something I used to be fairly familiar with.
In fact, when I originally wrote this particular manuscript, my self-compiled book of myths and legends from the British Isles was within reach. I was so focused on telling the story in my outline, though, that I failed to think about how things actually work. For whatever reason, I took my Hollywood Egypt brain and applied it to the British Isles with a complete disregard for the cultural differences. That realization is bothering me so much that I have actually stopped working on that manuscript until I decide how I’m going to handle the issue.
What’s really bad is that I’m already rewriting the manuscript because my original outline left out the bad guys for a good 90% of the story. Even better, I completely failed to place any real emphasis on the site or the relic that are at the heart of the plot. 14,000 words into the rewrite, I’m now stopped again because the site and the relic are completely implausible for their setting.
The moral of the story here is that it is good to write what you are familiar with, but you really should write down what you think you know and do some fact-checking and research both before you start and along the way to keep yourself on track.
Jul
6
Since I’m trying to point my feet that direction, I’ve recently started following more of the conversation on instructional design. Over the weekend, I read a tweet where the person suggested you had to include three examples or your teaching effort was nothing more than a presentation.
Students have found both Dead Bunny’s blog and videos helpful, and both usually are built around the actual math skill and maybe one example to illustrate use. When I’m face to face with a student, I’ll show them how to do the skill and then guide them as they do their own work. Most of my students wouldn’t even have the patience to let me get through multiple examples if they already understand what I’ve asked them to do.
Even when I was doing my teacher prep, none of my teachers suggested that you needed a specific number of examples to help someone understand. During my museum education career, none of my managers ever returned a lesson plan to me for a rewrite if it didn’t have the right number of examples.
I have to wonder where this magical number came from, because I’ve always been allowed to teach or design with just enough examples to get the point across without becoming tedious or disengaging. Is this really a rule of thumb for instructional design?
Jun
29
Man, check out that Cover Girl
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While attending voiceover workshops last summer, one of the things I learned is that the voiceover industry tends to be male-dominated. Despite the fact I noticed both workshops had more women attending, I really didn’t think much about it until I was watching TV last night. I had just finished watching one of the America’s Next Top Model cycles, had just finished watching a young woman win a Cover Girl contract (based in part on a commercial she shot during the competition)…and listened to a man announce a Cover Girl commercial.
Somehow, that just seems wrong to me. It’s a product for women. Women are featured in the ads. Why isn’t a woman narrating those commercials?
I started digging around, and while I didn’t find much I did find that studies have discovered that we tend to find women believable and men authoritative when we listen to voiceovers. I also discovered how much I don’t pay attention to movie trailers. I think in the back of my mind I’ve always recognized that movie trailers are narrated by men, but with Don LaFontaine’s passing last year there has been a slow, subtle movement to hire women to do these trailers. It hasn’t always been successful because of the movies involved, but there has still at last been an effort.
It’s something I want to start paying more attention to. Does it matter whether the material needs to be believable or come from an authority figure? Is the right gender advertising the product? Are women really not well-represented in the voiceover industry?
Jun
12
The Heroine’s Journey
Filed Under character development, content development, storytelling, writing | View Comments
Last year, one of the io9 editors complained that the Hero’s Journey is male-specific, and no one ever approaches it with a female character.
But I’m currently reading Mercedes Lackey’s Elemental Masters series, and while the books themselves aren’t impressing me, they’re making me think. Each novel retells a different fairy tale, presenting a different take on Beauty, Cinderella, and Briar Rose.
The retellings are interesting because they do show the core of each girl’s story, and in revisiting each girl in that different light Lackey actually shows how much the Hero’s Journey story structure affects fairy tale heroines. Each girl goes on a transformative journey where she loses something or someone important to her, meets someone (often supernatural) who wants to help guide her through her journey, meets a supernatural being who wants to stop her journey, experiences some form of death, and emerges changed and ready to take her place as the heroine she is.
So, the question isn’t, “Why don’t women have stories told in the Hero’s Journey format?” It’s “Why can’t we see the Hero’s Journey format for what it is, regardless of the gender of the character?”
It’s something to think about.
