A Review of Engineering Play

[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.