Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
follows a highly authoritarian and strict regimen while the Ullens School follows a
more open and liberal approach. Furthermore, the level of English of the children
at Rudrayanee was much lower than that of the children at Ullens, which meant we
had to rely more on the teaching staff to act as mediators, which as a result had a
dampening effect on the actions of the children. This was patently obvious during
one of the play sessions in the Puppets Duets workshops where one of the boys who
was clearly having fun while playing was scolded by one of the teachers for laughing
out loud.
A surprising observation considering the fact that we expected to find differ-
ences between the schools due to the differences in socio-economic background and
technology exposure was the lack of a huge difference when it came to exploring
mechanisms and creating things using the technology.
In Parapara workshop, there were no observable differences between the two
schools in terms of their use of the application or the impressiveness of the drawings
they created. A similar observation was made in the Puppets Duets workshop where
despite the fact that they were not given any information about the game, children
in both schools were able to discover the mechanics and rule set of the game by
themselves with the only difference being the creative ways in which they applied
their newly acquired knowledge but as noted above this probably has more to do with
the style of tuition of the school and therefore the freedom the children felt they had
to express their creativity than any inherent difference in creativity and thought.
However, as mentioned above, in the case of children playing with the Oriboo and
t-words, children in Rudrayanee enjoyed and explored more the physical attributes
of the technology as well as the more simple games implemented in the device. They
actually were overexcited about many of these games. This, together with the fact
that the researchers were facing some language issues, made the researchers discard
introducing the multiplayer games that were meant to be played after the initial phase
of exploring the simple games (games constructed on top of these simple games and
requiring of social control for rules and/or outcome). At Ullens, it was easier to
move from this initial phase of discovering the games and physical device, to a
phase of building socially on top of them. This might very well be a consequence
of the different degree of excitement caused by a different degree of novelty effect
or exposure to technology: children at Rudrayanee seemed to not get bored with
the initial simple single player games, while we feel that children at Ullens would
eventually have. On the other hand and in line with the other workshops, children of
both schools seemed to grasp the simple games implemented in the Oriboo similarly.
In terms of performance, it is difficult to say, since scores were not kept so that not
to foster a focus on performance. They seemed though as if they were handling the
games just fine at both schools.
Children in the Creative Design workshop at Ullens tended to focus on problem
affecting their community and country (e.g. sanitation, health care, political corrup-
tion), whereas children at Rudrayanee tended to focus on more personal problems
(e.g. access to the internet, girls having a lack of time to have access to computers
in the community due to farm and house work compared to boys). This is likely a
result of their socio-economic status and educational focus to some extent. In both
