Digital Artifact 2;

It was Artifact Day this week, when we all got to show our digital artifacts for class.

A few of the ideas that stayed back in my head were Mike's "Flashcards" to help dyslexic children, Ashley's "Tune It Up", the website about learning English through stories, and Catherine's game with "Zoo Animals" to help children tackle issues with depression.

Again, it was really interesting to see how we expanded our ideas from Digital Artifact 1, to build something more concrete in a similar direction. Ricardo's visuals about creating a timeline to preserve information about the cultures that have existed through California, from when it was a part of Mexico, to becoming an independent state to a part of the United States was quite fascinating. Paul introduced us to his summer storytelling class, using collaborative storytelling. I looked this up online and an interesting prototype for this is a website called "Storybird" which uses collaborative storytelling to connect kids and families, and is a good base to build off on.

Jacob introduced us to a prototype of his new game to help middle school students understand and learn more about Biology. The visuals were fascinating, especially for me, because I always have had an inherent aversion to blood and internal organs, and it's amazing how beautifully made these games are, and how much more interactive they make learning because you are fully immersed in the environment.

Ashley's "Tune It Up" is a great idea for a website, to allow children in rural villages in India to practice their English writing using storytelling, and then scanning those stories and uploading them to a website for everyone to read. The stories can be organized by themes, and possibly ages? It’s a really low res way to put the stories out there for everyone to read, and give these children a medium of expressing their creativity and thoughts and learning at the same time. It would be great to have an option that would allow a publisher to buy one or more of these stories and compile them into a book, which could then be sold, and the proceeds sent to the children, to give them access to higher resolution tools to work with, and for the website to sustain.

Yaa spoke to us about Languages of Tanzania. I looked this up online, and found a language map listing about 114 languages in the country, of which Swahili and English are most widely spoken. Creating an archive of would be a wonderful way to preserve these languages and related cultural trappings, for generations to come. In India, there are libraries all across the country, which hold ancient documents and scrolls in forgotten cultures and languages, as a way of preserving them, but accessibility to them is very limited.

Christopher outlined the idea of a website to bring together resources to combat bullying, an extension of his first digital artifact. Keith similarly outlined a website to talk about creating employment opportunities for the homeless, and allowing them to build their resume by using the website to learn basic skills, which I thought was a great concept. Katy spoke about using movies to connect to children in the Lucille Packard children's wing who need this outlet to connect to the world. I would love to learn more about her concept, and see a little more detail about how this works with the children. Tony spoke about creating a website to bring together resources for creating a curriculum for and teaching Hip-Hop with some extremely cool apps that exist in the market.

Mike created a web based Flashcard system to teach alphabets to young children who have dyslexia, which was one of the ideas I really liked. It is such a clean simple interface that gives the dyslexic kids exactly what they need in terms of repetition and looking at an alphabet and listening to what it sounds like. There is also a system which allows the parent to rank the understanding of the child, to see how far they have progressed with learning the alphabet. Looking up online, it seems that most of the software that exists for helping people with dyslexia is targeted more towards reading out material to them, or making existing web pages and the computer easy to navigate through. Again, I really liked Mike's concept of helping the children through a flashcard system. It would be great to see an extension of the alphabets to maybe "2 alphabets" or "3 letter words", and perhaps an iPhone application which can be carried around.

Catherine's webpage about teaching children about depression through an "Animal Zoo" game was very creative and inspirational. Catherine is a wonderful artist and her idea about having the child walk through the zoo, and understand the needs of each animal, and help solve them was something I could completely relate to. Each animal signified a specific issue that a child who has depression deals with, and by helping the animal understand and resolve their issue and make them happy, the child can work through their own depression issues. I kept thinking it would be so cool if the animals could actually talk to the child about how they feel, giving the child a deeper sense of connection and understanding!

We also heard from Janelle about her website to help a child with ADD track his or her day and how to get them through their tasks with encouragement and rewards from their parents and teachers throughout the process using "Cookies". Jaehi spoke to us about creating a user friendly phone for the elderly people, to give them information about their medical and health issues and to allow them to contact the provider in need. This was a great idea, and probably the only device idea that any of us had, which is why it stuck in my head. We finally wrapped up with Tanya and Coram's presentations. Coram spoke about creating a social network to bring the elderly and children in the foster network, two groups of people who really need a strong sense of community. And Tanya's was a cool comic book, about teaching basic first aid to Hispanic children who live on the Mexican side of the US/Mexican Border.