Children’s Book for iPad Teaches Acceptance
At first glance, Pop It seems no different from the many other interactive children’s books “popping up” on the market for the iPad. But give the screen a shake and you’ll begin to see the bigger picture. The book features a child going through normal daily activities with his parents. By shaking the iPad, these parents can be changed from a homosexual couple, to a lesbian couple, to a heterosexual couple.
“It’s a metaphor for shaking from one perspective to another,” said artist and author Raghava KK in an interview with Mashable. “The relationship between parent and child does not change if they have two moms, two dads. I’m challenging the concept of family.”
Raghava hopes to use the concept to teach children to be open-minded about a variety of issues, including racial and ethnic biases. Eventually, he would like the project to be open-source and to allow users to create interpretations that address different biases that they deal with in their everyday lives. Continue reading this story on the Spark blog…
Parenting forums?
I was wondering if anyone could help me out. I’m looking for:
Active forums or message boards about:
-parenting
-teaching
-elementary education
-digital media learning
-kids and technology
Do any of you visit or know of any forums like this? If you do, I’d really appreciate you sending me a link!
Thanks in advance!
Billboards Give Pittsburgh Youth a Voice
Hear Me, a project of CMU’s CREATE Lab, strives to make the voices of children heard. This summer, they have chosen a larger-than-life medium that they hope will give children one more way to communicate: billboards. So far, 50 billboards have been erected in Allegheny County and the surrounding region. The topics discussed cover everything from cyber-bullying and neighborhood violence to concerns over the environment. One billboard reads, “I still get called names… —- Crystal, 16.” Another reads, “I was scared when I first heard the gunshot… — Sherdina, 12.” The billboards include links that viewers can follow to the Hear Me website where they’ll find audio stories from more than 3,000 students in 25 school districts.
“We assume that children today have plenty of opportunities to make their dreams, fears and hopes known, whether it’s by a mobile phone, computer or just talking,” said Heide Waldbaum, director of Hear Me, “But learning how to express themselves about things that they really care about — and getting adults and people in authority to really listen to them — is difficult for many young people.”
Read more on the Spark blog…
As the Budget Gets Smaller, Class Time Gets Shorter
It’s no secret that state and local budget cuts have been putting pressure on education. A recently published New York Times article discusses one of the many outcomes of this pressure– decreased class time. It seems many institutions are dealing with a smaller budget by creating a shorter school day. “Thousands of school districts across the nation are gutting summer-school programs, cramming classes into four-day weeks or lopping days off the school year.”
This is a surprising development considering our current administration’s stance on education reform. At his 2009 confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared,
“Our school day is too short, our school week is too short, our school year is too short.”
This view is based on several factors, among them our desire to compete with more education-savvy nations who enforce much longer school days. Many educators will also agree that over the summer months, many students forget what they’ve learned and need to be re-instructed come fall.
Read the rest of the story on the Spark blog…
Project Spotlight: The Schmutz Company
Open the door to 5405 Broad Street and you’ll feel a lot like you’ve wandered into Pee Wee’s Play House. That is of course if you replace all of the talking furniture with pieces of ongoing projects—lighting rigs, puppetry, video props, and art installations to name a few. Dave English actually made the comparison himself when I visited his home and studio space, The Schmutz Lodge, on June 26, 2011. In a way it’s the perfect vehicle for explaining what Dave English and Don Orkoskey do: create a space where creativity, education, and innovation collide. The Schmutz Lodge is nestled into a line of mill-era row houses a block away from the Penn Avenue Arts District in Garfield. It serves as home base for The Schmutz Company—a collaborative arts organization that does everything from teaching children animation to performing live puppet shows. It’s hard to believe that when the Schmutz duo first met they were working as mortgage processors. Luckily cubicles are notoriously ineffective structures for containing artists. Don and Dave broke free and decided instead to focus on their respective crafts of photography and puppetry. A few years after their escape, they found themselves at Dave’s place constructing creatures from wire, wine corks, and other flotsam of which they then took a sequence of photos. This was the first day of animation for the Schmutz Company. 
Since then, The Schmutz Company has taken on many projects, including Papermation. Made possible through a partnership with the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Spark-funded Papermation teaches children (and adults) how to create animations using stop-motion photography. When asked if they were ever surprised by the children’s abilities or the type of work they created, Dave replied,
“Surprised might not be the right word but impressed definitely. Of course we’ve worked with kids who are skilled beyond their years as fine artists, as storytellers, or as group leaders but we’ve come to expect profound content. Kids have an uninhibited threshold for creativity that many adults lose once they start paying taxes. If somebody surprised us it would have been a Russian three year old who told the story of a rocket kissing a fish. Or maybe the girl who turned a charcoal animation into a statement on eminent domain.”
Papermation workshops have been hosted by the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, the Warhol Museum, the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and various other venues throughout the region. The nomadic ability of the project allows for a much wider audience than do static installations. Don pointed out that although Pittsburgh residents may live within driving distance of cultural districts and events, they don’t always view these resources as accessible. Projects like Papermation aim to change that, and in doing so to provide a valuable learning opportunity to area children.
“We want them to retain three main lessons. We want them to appreciate the sense of teamwork that comes from working on a group project with people who they may not know or who may be very different from them. We want them to recognize the simplicity of the process we use to make our animations. We want them to learn how to tell collaborative improvisational stories.”
In addition to their work on Papermation, the Schmutz duo is also at work establishing a new artist residency. Located right next door to the Schmutz Lounge, come July 1st, the Garfield Bridge will be inhabited by its founding resident artists painter/educator Paul O’Brien and musician/singer Autumn Ayers. The Schmutz team describe their vision of the residency:
“The residency will house two artists of different disciplines whose coexistence and cross-pollination will shape the work they produce. The residency’s goal is to put artists in the role of well-supported community organizer supporting cultural growth and community interaction that will be relevant to the neighbors. (…)The work they create will overlap their artistic goals with the interests of the existing residents. The first few months of work will focus on improving the property at 5407 Broad, developing interpersonal connections in the neighborhood, fundraising, and grant proposals.”
They plan to host an opening event in the fall of 2011. Talk to Dave and Don long enough and you’ll hear one word again and again—community. The two are clearly invested in the region and in using their projects as tools for strengthening communal connections and making Pittsburgh a better place. The Schmutz Lodge is a perfect example of the transformative power of art and this metamorphosis doesn’t end on Broad Street. Thanks to Papermation and the work being done by the Schmutz company, artistic innovation is alive and well in Pittsburgh. Photography by Jessica Pachuta. See more photos from The Schmutz Lodge. For more information visit The Schmutz Company website.
The Key to Fighting Childhood Obesity—a Media Diet?
The fact that childhood obesity is a growing epidemic is a point rarely refuted. A cursory scroll through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website provides some undeniable, and frightening, data:
Approximately 17% (or 12.5 million) of children and adolescents aged 2—19 years are obese.
Since 1980, obesity prevalence among children and adolescents has almost tripled.
While everyone seems to be in agreement that childhood obesity is an issue of growing importance, no one seems to agree on the cause. Many blame the growing prevalence of fast-food restaurants. Others blame agressive marketing that targets children in an effort to create life-long customers for unhealthy products. Still others point the finger at the school system, at parents, at manufacturers, and the list goes on. One factor that’s currently in the spotlight? Media consumption.
According to a recently published NPR article, pediatricians are recommending a diet low in media as a means of preventing childhood obesity.
First, at each well-child visit, pediatricians should ask these two questions: How much time are you spending in front of a screen each day? Is there a TV or device with an Internet connection in your bedroom?
The answers to these questions could allow doctors to identify inactivity before its negative effects can take their toll. So how much tv time is too much?
Kids, the pediatricians say, shouldn’t spend more than 2 hours a day plopped down in front of the computer, TV or other glowing device. The littlest kids — those 2 and under — shouldn’t watch any TV at all.
For concerned parents, there is some good news: children’s programming is evolving to address the issue. Programs like Dance-A-Lot Robot and Imagination Movers are aimed at getting children off of the couch and onto their feet by incorporating dances and other exercise. So if your little one has trouble peeling away from the screen, use programs like these to make sure they get exercise while they watch.
Of course children will make the transition from couch potato to active kid a lot easier if you provide them with fun activities, and responsible ways for them to enjoy media. Check out our Funded Projects page to learn about some of the programs available in your area and stay tuned for events and program updates through the Spark Blog!
Slideshow presents the evolution of kid’s computers (
