Panwapa observations

Overall I didn't love this program. The home page (is that what you would call it? or just the interface?`) offers an array of characters for kids to explore, so it does incite curiosity and involvement from the start as kids would tap on he various figures to see what they say and what happens. (Thinking skill: ability to explore). However, I felt as if there was not enough set up/direction to help kids understand what they were seeing and what they were expected to do.

The "Movies" section contains short videos showing kids in different countries, giving a portrait of their lives and culture. The first thing I noticed was that some of the videos had the child speaking in English, which seemed just weird. Do you want kids to think that English is spoken everywhere in the world? I thought that hearing the kids speak their native languages with a voiceover translation would be better -- and then I saw that at least some of the movies were in fact done this way.

The movies play twice -- the second time the onscreen guide presents a challenge/game to the viewers, such as "Hit on the Panwapa sign (a globe) whenever you see the clock in the clock tower."

The little games seemed a bit too simple/boring, though perhaps not for a four-year-old. They seem designed to develop the ability to listen and look closely, since you have to hear and understand the instructions and then see when to perform the action requested.

In one case the game posed an open-ended question, "What could you do to make guests feel at home in your house?" (Thinking skill: brainstorming.) The feedback at the end of the game was "Good job" and "Try again" (I think - I only elicited 'good job' not that I am bragging.) This is, according to the reading, not engaging or helpful enough as feedback -- though for a game at this level, what else could you do?

Another thinking skill called upon here -- I believe inappropriately -- is "interpreting data." After the game based on the movie was over, there was a choice to answer a question related to the movie and then see how other "Panwapa kids" had answered it, which brought up a bar graph I thought beyond the comprehension of most or all of the target audience. (Though not, perhaps, beyond the skills of the tiny "Speyer Scholars" I read about in today's Times, students at a new private school for gifted kids.)

And the movie section took a long time to load, by which time a lot of kids would have gotten restless and gone off to do something else. Not sure how you get around that.