Month: January 2019

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Evocative Objects – 16/01/19

“Theory enables us, for example, to explore how everyday objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within.” (Turkle. S, 2011)

As part of our first session we were asked to bring in an evocative object, which we would then share and show to the rest of the class and explain why this object had meaning to us and caused emotion. The definition of ‘evocative’ means “bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind”, the object could be a simple ornament within the house that reminds you of a trip or funny memory, a piece of jewellery given to you by a family member or a toy from your childhood or something that was passed on to you by a special person.

My evocative object was a Hamleys snow globe given to me by my mum at Christmas. Hamleys is the oldest and largest toy shop in the world and one of the world’s best-known retailers of toys. It was founded by William Hamley and the first store was named “Noahs Ark” and was opened in London, in 1760. The story behind the the snow globe is that every Christmas when we would decorate the house I would always get to help get the decorations out and put them out and up around the house. Of course my favourite decoration was the snow globe, I enjoyed watching the snow and glitter dance around the teddy bear in the middle of the globe, so now that I’m all grown up and have my own flat to decorate, my mum gave me a matching snow globe to the one from my childhood and she had been keeping it for the past 20 years and waited until I had my own place to put out my snow globe.

Evocative objects remind us that we need to treasure the people around us before they leave us, to enjoy life and the experiences it throws our way, to cherish our time as children and the memories we make. It’s important to have these objects, important for us to feel these emotions, to remember those memories because these are the things that help shape who we are. What we feel and experience helps build our personalities and character, what we have been through change in a positive way they way we look and treat others, change how we see the world. We have a piece of those objects with us all the time and our objects have a piece of us, they make us who we are.

 

References:

• Oxford University Press (2019) Evocative, Available at: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/evocative (Accessed: 16th January 2019).
•  Turkle, S. (2011). Evocative objects. 1st ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Today we were learning about programmable toys and specifically a toy called ‘Bee Bot’. We were asked to read an article before the class called ‘Robots in early education’, which gave us some useful knowledge about Bee-Bot and the experience some children have had with this toy. For example, “The children had great fun. No-one was reluctant to use the Bee-Bot or had to be persuaded, and most returned for an extra activity”  (Lydon, 2008, P.2). On reflection of this activity I noticed the majority of the class having fun with the activity, which further backs up this statement. I found this article interesting and very helpful as I have absolutely no experience with programmable toys and this gave me some insight and knowledge about them. The aim of today’s class was to design an activity for children using Bee-Bot achieving one or more experience and outcomes for the curriculum for excellence. “ The curriculum introduces programmable toys as a good example for developing knowledge and understanding of the contemporary world (Janka, 2008, P.2). 

 

It took me a while to decide what activity I was going to design. I had so many ideas in my head, however a lot of these ideas were far too complicated and not directed for the early years or first level children. I decided to choose my experiences and outcomes and then design and fit my activity around that. The experiences and outcomes I decided to choose were, HWB 1-15a. This curricular area is Health and Wellbeing and the experience and outcome is “I am developing my understanding of the human body and can use this knowledge to maintain and improve my wellbeing and health”. I then decided that this would tie in nicely with one of my initial ideas, which was to identify the organs in the body. My plan was to draw the outline of the body and then draw and colour in the organs. I assumed this would be straightforward, however I encounter a couple of problems such as there are two lungs and two kidneys in the body, and I couldn’t squeeze the pair of organs in the one box. This wasn’t a problem I envisioned before starting, it was only when starting to draw I noticed this was an issue. I managed to get around this problem by making sure I asked for the left side of these organs to be acknowledged in the questions. I could have also by passed this issue by only putting one of the organs on the drawing, but I did not want the children to think we only had one of these organs. My second issue was the large and small intestine would take more space up than one box and the small intestine is inside the large. I made the decision to draw half the large and half the small intestine in separate boxes next to each other. Reflecting now I am not sure if I have made the right choice by doing that and I may take a different approach to the drawing of these organs in future. TCH 1-14b was another experience and outcome, which covered this activity. The curricular area is technologies and the experience and outcome covered in this area was “Demonstrates an understanding of the meaning of individual instructions when using a visual programming language”. As part of the activity children need to read a question for example,” which organ pumps blood around the body” once the child decides they know which organ they are looking for they must then locate that organ on the drawing of a human body with Bee-Bot. They need to follow specific instructions to allow Bee-Bot to move from one location to another. I believe this activity would be very beneficial to children and by using Bee-Bot it would further enhance the learning experience for the children. I found this task extremely rewarding for myself and I thoroughly enjoyed designing the activity. I hope going forward I can learn from my mistakes and design better activities covering a variety of outcomes and experiences for the curriculum for excellence. 

 

I feel this activity was a success and I can see how beneficial Bee-Bot can be to improving academic and life skills for children. I have taken on board the mistakes i have made designing this activity and I feel next time I can create an even better activity. 

 

References  

 

Janka, P. (2008) Using a programmable toy at preschool age: Why and how? 

 

ICTopus Article (2008) Sharing good practice: Robots in Early Education by Alison Lydon