Dancing Alphabet

The letter G zooms across the screen, bounces against the lower edge and tumbles backwards, Pong-style while grunting "gu, gu, gu, gu." Add a B and an R and you get the soft bumping of B sounds and a rolling R as the letters continue to careen up and down and back and forth. Yes, it's been a long day, and I can't stop playing with Jorg Piringer's amazing and beautiful kinetic alphabet application for the iPhone. Titled abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, it's an example of exuberant visual poetry and I like it for its graceful but fun interface, but I'm also thinking about it in the context of literacies for pre-schoolers. What would they think of it?

At USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy, where I work, we've had the pleasure of meeting weekly with a group of 4-year-olds from a nearby preschool. We were inspired to try something by the Center for Public Broadcasting's October 2009 report based on the Ready to Learn Initiative; the report shows that "preschool children who participated in a media-rich curriculum incorporating public television video and games into classroom instruction develop the early literacy skills critical for success in school." The project gave preschool teachers a curriculum that integrated episodes of CPB programming and computer games, along with teaching guidelines, and literacy levels were shown to increase. We were also inspired by the work at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, specifically the report titled "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning."Our project, called the Junior AV Club, wanted to take things a step farther and see if actually making media could enhance literacy, especially if we called attention to the database structures of letters and words, as well as those of pictures and video. The group so far has learned how to take pictures, organize them into collages, create stop-motion animation, and understand the poetics of sound. One of the things we've discovered, though, is a paucity of really exciting and visually compelling media projects for young students. The new Super Why app is, well, super, but so many of the games and apps rely on awful farmyard scenes with ugly animals and dreadful colors. It will be interesting to see how the group responds to Piringer's app...