[A Review of Mizuko Ito's Engineering Play for ACM Computing Reviews ]
As many young parents, I watch children's software with a mix of opportunity and trepidation. Studies show that video games may benefit cognitive functions [1], but at the same time violence can he disconcerting. Moreover, children are increasingly spending more time on digital media creating, communicating, even building identities, so that the discussion about children's interaction with computers is getting wider and wider.
Mizuko Ito's Engineering Play is a welcome addition to the discussion, putting children's software into perspective. Ito, a cultural anthropologist, observes that such software already has a history of some decades. Putting on a historian's hat she shows how digital products targeting children have evolved from the 1970s to our day, and how these products interact with existing institutions and, intriguingly, how children themselves appropriate them, often in ways that stand in direct contrast to the expectations of grown ups.
Ito distinguishes three types of children's software. Academic software aims squarely at improving a particular academic skill taught at school. Entertainment software (also called edutainment) consists of games with a wholesome kids-friendly appeal—a Walt Disney version of the digital world—but without any pretense other than providing fun. Construction software builds on the ideas of Seymour Papert that the best way to use a computer is for allowing kids to build things with it; in a sense, passing the hacker ethic to kids. The LOGO programming language was a prime exemplar, but SimCity and related titles are also in this category.
The evolution of these genres makes clear, however, that the intentions of the pioneers in each of them notwithstanding, the path they eventually took was heavily influenced by the institutional and corporate frameworks in which they were adopted and produced respectively. Simply put, they did not change schooling, but rather adapted to it; and they did not change the software and media industry, but rather became an integral part of them.
In the concluding section of the book, Ito notes that if she where to place her bets on which genre has the potential to transform childhood learning, it would be construction, a position that will be close to the heart of many computer scientists. Rebecca Mead, in a recent article in The New Yorker [2], points out that the design of children playgrounds has been following two different tacks: on the one hand we have playgrounds with the four "S"'s—the swing, the sandbox, the seesaw, and the slide. On the other hand, we have playgrounds where children are provided with stuff like wood and metal and various tools for kids to do whatever they want with it. Construction software may be the digital equivalent of such imagination play spaces.
The book is good reading as it is. If it could benefit from something, it would primarily be some better editing—the prose gets heavy sometimes, although readers accustomed to social studies may find the style familiar (I wondered at the number of times "contestation" appeared). While there are plenty of references, there are two endnotes for the whole book, which raises the question why there are there in the first place. The anthropological research related in the book took place in the late 1990s, but it does not seem out of date. Overall the book deserves a wider readership than anxious parents.
[1] C. Shawn Green Alexandre Pouget and Daphne Bavelier. Improved Probabilistic Inference as a General Learning Mechanism with Action Video Games, Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 17, pp. 1573–1579, 14 September 2010.
[2] Rebecca Mead, State of Play, The New Yorker, July 5, 2010, pp. 32–37.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
From Dürer to Walton Ford
Episode 75 of BBC Radio 4's excellent A History of the World in 100 Objects series was about Albrecht Dürer's "Rhinoceros" print. The print was very successful: "Using wood-block allowed him [Dürer] to print around four to five thousand copies of this image during his lifetime, and nobody knows how many millions have sold in other forms since. This image stuck. In works of natural history, above all, Dürer's rhino turned out to be unshiftable, even when more accurate depictions of the animal were available. In the seventeenth century, copies of this print could be seen on the doors of Pisa Cathedral and in a church fresco in Colombia in South America. It's appeared on ceramics everywhere from Meissen to Liverpool, and it's now a popular T-shirt and a fridge magnet."
Dürer, however, had never seen a live rhinoceros, which may explain why the depicted beast differs from the real one. It has an extra horn, and it is"covered with armour plating, not really skin, and that armour plating is worked just like metal armour - with swirls and scales and spirals, which manage to look military and decorative all at the same time".
The rhinoceros was inspired by a real one. In 1514 the Portuguese nobleman Alfonso d' Albuquerque, who established the Portuguese colonial empire in India, received the rhinoceros from the Sultan of Gujarat, and, probably not knowing what to do with it, sent it over to Portugal to his king. It created a sensation in Lisbon, and then the Portuguese king forwarded it as a present to the Pope in Rome. Unfortunately, it never made it there. "The ship carrying it was hit by a storm off La Spezia, and sank with all hands. Although rhinos are competent swimmers, since this one was chained to the deck, it also drowned."
In our own time Dürer's rhino has been reincarnated in a painting by Walton Ford, an american artist that paints watercolors of animals in the tradition of John Jay Audubon. Ford straddles the boundary between illustration and painting, as his work, although deeply naturalistic, is frequently disconcerting. There is something in a painting that enables a second reading. One can see that in his excellent Pancha Tantra, which by the way has become a favorite reading of my toddler children.
One of Ford's most striking paintings is The Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros, a retake of the Dürer masterpiece, where the rhino is shown dramatically at the moment the water comes gushing over the ship, on his legs. Chained on the mast, the rhino is meeting death.
Apart from the wrenching imagery and the vivid colors, it is the different conception of nature in the two works, Dürer's and Ford's that struck me. In Dürer's print, nature is powerful, to be admired, its strength resembling that of human manufacture (so witness the rhino's armor), but transcending it. In Ford's painting, nature is drowning, victim of human vanity and incompetence. The difference five hundred years have made.
Dürer, however, had never seen a live rhinoceros, which may explain why the depicted beast differs from the real one. It has an extra horn, and it is"covered with armour plating, not really skin, and that armour plating is worked just like metal armour - with swirls and scales and spirals, which manage to look military and decorative all at the same time".
The rhinoceros was inspired by a real one. In 1514 the Portuguese nobleman Alfonso d' Albuquerque, who established the Portuguese colonial empire in India, received the rhinoceros from the Sultan of Gujarat, and, probably not knowing what to do with it, sent it over to Portugal to his king. It created a sensation in Lisbon, and then the Portuguese king forwarded it as a present to the Pope in Rome. Unfortunately, it never made it there. "The ship carrying it was hit by a storm off La Spezia, and sank with all hands. Although rhinos are competent swimmers, since this one was chained to the deck, it also drowned."
In our own time Dürer's rhino has been reincarnated in a painting by Walton Ford, an american artist that paints watercolors of animals in the tradition of John Jay Audubon. Ford straddles the boundary between illustration and painting, as his work, although deeply naturalistic, is frequently disconcerting. There is something in a painting that enables a second reading. One can see that in his excellent Pancha Tantra, which by the way has become a favorite reading of my toddler children.
One of Ford's most striking paintings is The Loss of the Lisbon Rhinoceros, a retake of the Dürer masterpiece, where the rhino is shown dramatically at the moment the water comes gushing over the ship, on his legs. Chained on the mast, the rhino is meeting death.
Apart from the wrenching imagery and the vivid colors, it is the different conception of nature in the two works, Dürer's and Ford's that struck me. In Dürer's print, nature is powerful, to be admired, its strength resembling that of human manufacture (so witness the rhino's armor), but transcending it. In Ford's painting, nature is drowning, victim of human vanity and incompetence. The difference five hundred years have made.
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