Created for:
- Digital Media Design for Learning (DMDL) degree; Cognitive Science and Educational Technology I course (Spring 2014).
Project length:
- Medium-long (approx. last quarter of the term, final group project design document).
Team:
- Saira Mallick
- Matt McGowan
- my principle contributions: “Background,” “Problem Description,” “Delivery Platform” and “Project Narrative.”
- Ruth Sherman
- Shalini Shroff
Challenge:
- As a group, produce a full, thorough design document on a project of mutual interest.
A few years ago, I read Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid (2007) and was floored to learn (amongst other things) that
[a] prominent [1995] study found that by kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically impoverished homes from their more stimulated peers. In other words, in some environments the average young middle-class child hears 32 million more spoken words than the young underprivileged child by age five. (p. 20)
In class, I was fortunate to have three other classmates become interested enough in this “word gap” to work on a project together. What we came up with was a mobile application titled “OPEN: the Journal.”
The main goals of this design are to:
- promote the sustainability of programs such as the Thirty Million Words Initiative, and
- support approaches learned in initial interventions–i.e. engaging in conversations with young children and speaking to children using a larger number and a greater variety of words.
The full design document can be found here:
Matthew McGowan - portfolio 