What do Cartoons have to do with Learning Math?
What if children’s media could be as educational as it is entertaining? It’s a laudable goal. Lately there has been the rush of the creation of new educational television and digital media that educates students as it engages them. Children these days spend a lot of time on television and being online. It is a boon to use these tools to drive their learning math and literacy skills.
Today, new television shows on a variety of mediums have been released that have more educational content integrated in them with a variety of digital media such as interactive websites, mobile apps, or e-books. What is wonderful about the current drive is that, the approach of the creators is to connect these different media with common storylines or problem-solving. They then tested whether this “transmedia” approach might result in increased educational effectiveness when used with learners from low-income backgrounds.
There is a supposition that each of the different learning platforms have different strengths – for example, television excels at linear storytelling, while interactive games create opportunities to practice new skills. So therefore, the bridge was created between these platforms were to drive the students to work their way through a greater variety of content, to encounter a richer variety of learning strategies, and to better link experiences in the home, in school or pre-school, and “on the go.”
It is our hope that our ministry of education and science respectively encourages Scientists, Educators and IT companies to carry out targeted research about these multimedia approaches for students’ learning.
In the United States,researchers generally found positive results when using these products. For example, in one random trial conducted by EDC and SRI studying the use of PBS KIDS’ “Peg+Cat” transmedia among 4- and 5-year olds in home and family environments, children using the “Peg+Cat” intervention showed significant improvements on math skill areas such as ordinal numbers, spatial relationships, and 3D shapes
(To learn more about the “Peg+Cat” study, see:http://pbskids.org/…/r…/summative-evaluationsimpact-studies/).
This is very encouraging and should lead to desiring duplication. These educational strategies show enormous impact in educational technology. What was even more interesting was that this technology led to parents and caregivers spending time using media with their children, engaging together in problem-solving, and finding ways to connect their experiences to daily life it led to positive play and social interaction, and wasn’t passive. That means that the impact wasn’t limited to the child and the screen; this approach encouraged parents, caregivers and children to spend more time learning together.
Previously we needed to use different devices for different purposes; increasingly, we are now using a variety of different devices to access the same content at our convenience. We have a variety of convergent devices that can play video content, run interactive learning games, and be used “on the go.
We need application developers, tv programming and games here in Nigeria, and Africa as a whole that have long, more integrated learning experiences that are able to incorporate a variety of learning strategies without requiring children and their parents to move from one device to another.
We need to encourage the production of engaging, educationally meaningful content that works across multiple platforms. These would be able to leverage on all that I have shared here, use of analytics to collect learning data, and enable more personalized delivery of content.
We look forward to having our children gain from these efforts in the future.