Medford, Mass.
RECESS is no longer child’s play. Schools around the country, concerned about bullying and arguments over the use of the equipment, are increasingly hiring “recess coaches” to oversee students’ free time. Playworks, a nonprofit training company that has placed coaches at 170 schools from Boston to Los Angeles, is now expanding thanks to an $18 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Critics have suggested that such coaching is yet another example of the over-scheduling and over-programming of our children. And, as someone whose scholarly work has consistently reinforced the idea that young people need unstructured imagination time, I’d probably have been opposed to recess coaches in the past. But childhood has changed so radically in recent years that I think the trend makes sense, at least at some schools and with some students.
Children today are growing up in a world vastly different from the one their parents knew. As the writer Richard Louv has persuasively chronicled, our young people are more aware of threats to the global environment than they are of the natural world in their own backyards.
A Nielsen study last year found that children aged 6 to 11 spent more than 28 hours a week using computers, cellphones, televisions and other electronic devices. A University of Michigan study found that from 1979 to 1999, children on the whole lost 12 hours of free time a week, including eight hours of unstructured play and outdoor activities. One can only assume that the figure has increased over the last decade, as many schools have eliminated recess in favor of more time for academics.
One consequence of these changes is the disappearance of what child-development experts call “the culture of childhood.” This culture, which is to be found all over the world, was best documented in its English-language form by the British folklorists Peter and Iona Opie in the 1950s. They cataloged the songs, riddles, jibes and incantations (“step on a crack, break your mother’s back”) that were passed on by oral tradition. Games like marbles, hopscotch and hide and seek date back hundreds of years. The children of each generation adapted these games to their own circumstances.
Yet this culture has disappeared almost overnight, and not just in America. For example, in the 1970s a Japanese photographer, Keiki Haginoya, undertook what was to be a lifelong project to compile a photo documentary of children’s play on the streets of Tokyo. He gave up the project in 1996, noting that the spontaneous play and laughter that once filled the city’s streets, alleys and vacant lots had utterly vanished.
For children in past eras, participating in the culture of childhood was a socializing process. They learned to settle their own quarrels, to make and break their own rules, and to respect the rights of others. They learned that friends could be mean as well as kind, and that life was not always fair.
Now that most children no longer participate in this free-form experience — play dates arranged by parents are no substitute — their peer socialization has suffered. One tangible result of this lack of socialization is the increase in bullying, teasing and discrimination that we see in all too many of our schools.
Bullying has always been with us, but it did not become prevalent enough to catch the attention of researchers until the 1970s, just as TV and then computers were moving childhood indoors. It is now recognized as a serious problem in all the advanced countries. The National Education Association estimates that in the United States, 160,000 children miss school every day because they fear attacks or intimidation by other students. Massachusetts is considering anti-bullying legislation.
While correlation is not necessarily causation, it seems clear that there is a link among the rise of television and computer games, the decline in peer-to-peer socialization and the increase of bullying in our schools. I am not a Luddite — I think that the way in which computers have made our students much more aware of the everyday lives of children in other countries is wonderful, and that they will revolutionize education as the new, tech-savvy generation of teachers moves into the schools. But we should also recognize what is being lost.
We have to adapt to childhood as it is today, not as we knew it or would like it to be. The question isn’t whether recess coaches are good or bad — they seem to be with us to stay — but whether they help students form the age-old bonds of childhood. To the extent that the coaches focus on play, give children freedom of choice about what they want to do, and stay out of the way as much as possible, they are likely a good influence.
In any case, recess coaching is a vastly better solution than eliminating recess in favor of more academics. Not only does recess aid personal development, but studies have found that children who are most physically fit tend to score highest on tests of reading, math and science.
Friedrich Fröbel, the inventor of kindergarten, said that children need to “learn the language of things” before they learn the language of words. Today we might paraphrase that axiom to say that children need to learn the real social world before they learn the virtual one.
by Nick Bilton NYTimes
Apple has hired Richard DeVaul, a veteran of the wearable computing field and co-founder of AWare Technologies, a technology company focused on creating products for the fitness and “wellness” markets.
According to Computerworld, Mr. DeVaul will be a senior prototype scientist at Apple, presumably working on some of the technologies he discusses on his blog:
I’m an expert in signal processing and real-time statistical classification techniques. This means that I know how to make tiny computers do “thin slicing,” as popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink.” It’s all about extracting the small pieces of information that are most meaningful.
What does this work mean for us mere mortals? According to Mr. DeVaul’sLinkedIn page, he received a Ph.D. in media arts and sciences from theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and while there worked on a project called “The Memory Glasses,” which offered real-time memory support that could “improve your performance on a memory recall task by a factor of about 63 percent without distracting you.”
In other words, these fancy glasses could probably help you remember where you left your car keys.
While at M.I.T. he also worked directly with Professor Alex Pentland in theHuman Dyanmics group. This group works on the intersection of humans and technology, and using sensors and the data that these wearable devices can share, to try to predict human behavior.
Although wearable computers are not necessarily a new idea, Apple helped push the concept further into the mainstream in 2006 when it partnered withNike to introduce the Nike+ line of sneakers. This product wirelessly connects to an iPod and tracks the distance and pace of a person’s run.
There’s no telling what’s next for Apple and this market. Maybe we’ll finally see a pair of wearable iPod glasses based on a series of 2008 patents for head-mounted displays. Or maybe the company will try to create new additions to the iPhone by offering attachments and sensors. One thing’s for sure, these technologies will continue to spread into our clothing, sneakers and maybe even our glasses.
In education circles, STEM—the teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—has been gathering, for want of a better descriptor, “alpha” status. Not only has President Barack Obama announced a $250 million public-private initiative to recruit and train more STEM teachers, but also the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top Fund grants competition is giving bonus points for applications that stress STEM instruction.
This funding is on top of the nearly $700 million the federal government already spends on science and math education programs within the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and other agencies. Factor in what’s earmarked by individual states for STEM and a picture emerges of where a lot of tax money is rightfully going.
This generous support is being allocated in the belief (or fear) that the United States is becoming less competitive and secure, that we are losing our global-leader status in STEM fields and being eclipsed by other...
Article in Education Week
Barbie, whose various careers have taken her from aerobics instructor to supermodel to business executive, will next be a computer engineer, a career chosen by half a million Barbie fans.
Computer Engineer Barbie still has her trademark cascade of blond hair, impossibly small waist, feet frozen on tiptoes to slide into her high heels and a whole lot of hot pink.
She also wears a neon-colored T-shirt with a binary code pattern and carries a smartphone and a Bluetooth headset. Her hot pink glasses will come in handy during late nights coding on her hot pink laptop. Before any one begins complaining, Mattel points out that her accessories were chosen with the help of the Society of Women Engineers and the National Academy of Engineering.
Computer engineer will be the 126th career for Barbie, who turned 50 last year. For the first time, Mattel, which makes the doll, asked people to vote for her career, choosing among computer engineer, architect, environmentalist, news anchor and surgeon.
The choice of computer engineer — a field in which men far outnumber women and in which women’s participation has been declining — was announced Friday at the New York Toy Fair.
Lynn Langit, a developer evangelist at Microsoft who teaches programming to girls and works on a Microsoft program called DigiGirlz that teaches girls about technology careers, said she was thrilled about Barbie’s next career.
“We can use any sort of positive influence that we have, because the number of girls studying programming is abysmal,” she said.
Her only suggestion: that Barbie get a multi-touch netbook next. “If Barbie needs any training, I would be happy to provide it,” she said.
Posted in NYT 2/16/10
Dearest Listeners,
I hope 2010 is treating you well thus far. Thank you so much for helping to launching Destination DIY towards some exciting new things in the year ahead. In just a few months, you'll be hearing new hour-long shows on topics such as DIY economy, Doing It Ourselves (creative projects that require collective action) and more! Destination DIY is coming into this year with a lot of good work to do.
Of course, good work is always more satisfying when it involves good friends. Thanks for the boost you gave Destination DIY towards funding the production of our next batch of episodes. Our supporters hail from such diverse locations as Portland, Cambridge, Madison, Brooklyn, Paris and Kamakura, Japan. I'm happy to say we're well on our way to enough funds to compensate a sound engineer and contributing producers for the next five episodes. ...
The idea of stitching circuitry into clothing may seem like a concept gleaned from the pages of a science-fiction novel set centuries into the future.
However, Yasmin Kafai of the Graduate School of Education — along with researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab and Indiana University — intends to do just that in an effort to cultivate interest in programming among youth.
The team received an $800,000 grant, titled “Computational Textiles as Materials for Creativity,” from the National Science Foundation in August to help its members realize this objective.
Kafai, the lead project investigator, explained that computational textiles, also known as “electronic” textiles, are soft materials with electronics — like sensors and light dials — and computer programs embedded in them.
“Nowadays, you have conductive thread that looks exactly like regular thread. You can actually stitch your circuits and combine the sensors with the light as embroidery,” she elaborated, adding that the process of fitting textiles with circuitry comprised the “engineering” element of the project.
The “computation” element lies in utilizing the LilyPad Arduino, an electronic textile construction kit, to hook the sensors and lights in the textiles up to a computer program with a USB cable. Once the programming is complete, it can then be determined how these textile components will interact with the environment.
“You can essentially illuminate the display on your clothes or on your bags, wherever you have it,” Kafai said. “You can put the electronics anywhere and use the conductive thread to create circuits and decorations — that’s the ‘creative’ part.”
Once the team receives clearance from the City of Philadelphia to work with students, it will hold after-school workshops at William H. Hunter Elementary School, the Penn Alexander School and the Science Leadership Academy.
During workshop sessions, students will design computational textile creations to share and discuss through Scratch, a web site Kafai designed while working at MIT. The site enables users to design programs and upload them to share with others, who will then provide feedback.
Kafai added that, as the project progresses, she hopes to work with teachers on integrating programming activities into their regular daytime curriculum as well.
The project coincides with Congress’s recent passage of resolution H. RES. 558, which urged “educators and policymakers to improve computer science learning at all educational levels, and to motivate increased participation in computer science,” according to a statement issued by the Association for Computing Machinery.
This national focus on expanding computer science education is likewise reflected in the NSF’s “Broadening Participation in Computing” initiative.
According to Kafai, the number of women and minorities interested in pursuing computer science degrees and careers has been consistently low over the last 10 years.
“That’s why there's a need to come up with innovative ways, particularly for youth, to demonstrate that programming isn’t just sitting in front of a computer screen in your room,” she said, “but has applications that connect you with the real world and your particular interests.”
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